#tourrorists!

To songwriter Mark Gergis's credit, there's a lot of good music on Tourrorists! "Continental Revolt" is a riotous Asian folk shindig, sounding like a cut from a Sublime Frequencies release on angel dust. "Magic Carpet of Holocaust Revival" slithers into an acoustic trance state, and "Tropical Cancer" provides an equally tripadelic dose of kraut-drone and found sounds. The album travels in largely the same orbit as Abduction label bosses Sun City Girls' work, but it's a more playful and kinetic affair.

The overtly political statements are where Gergis loses his focus. In a number of tracks, he takes sound bites from white, middle-class Americans and splices them into clumsily satiric dialogues. A businessman becomes a terrorist who wants to start a holy war. A female missionary becomes an agent of discord. These tracks ask interesting questions about America's motivations and hypocrisies, but Porest poses them with one-dimensional sarcasm that makes for weak storytelling and even weaker politics. For an album that asks us to listen to the other side (the terrorists' side) of the story, Tourrorists! offers far too many flat characters and transparent situations.