The Best of Alien Sex Fiend

Album review

Is this the best of Alien Sex Fiend? Unless you've been frying the fat with the band all along, you'll have a hard time even figuring out (or remembering) where and when the cuts were first released. All came out from 1983-1997, but otherwise there's no documentation, the liner notes consisting of a huge jumble of black-and-white scraps of Alien Sex Fiend chart listings, print reviews, and advertisements. From those chart reprints, at least, even a dunce can figure out -- with enough patience -- that many of the 15 songs made the charts, even if these were usually, or maybe always, British indie or specialized charts. Among those songs are the singles "Ignore the Machine," "Lips Can't Go," "Dead and Buried," "E.S.T. (Trip to the Moon)," "The Impossible Mission," and "I'm Doing Time in a Maximum Security Twilight Home," the last of these, surely the wittiest title from a band not known for being good-time Charlies. It's a sufficient overview of music that helped to define the goth rock genre, even if their on-the-edge outrage -- "I walk the line between good and evil" (from "I Walk the Line") being a typical proclamation -- was more bark than bite.

© Richie Unterberger /TiVo