Butthole Surfers Weird Trip Doesn't Require Enthusiasm

Like a bad acid flashback, Austin, Texas weirdos the Butthole Surfers rolled into Toronto for their first area concert in over a decade, touting their classic twin-drummer line-up and a colostomy bag full of catalogue favourites.

You could call this a nostalgic trip of sorts, but for band that embodies the poo-covered underbelly of North America, it was really a memorandum of the "bad ol' days" more than anything else.

A rather stoic Gibby Haynes led his bandmates on stage and judging by his expressionless demeanour, he was seemingly in the mood to bend some brains and not much else. He immediately grabbed the closest saxophone and made the implement moan on contact.

In classic Buttholes fashion, the band's nightmarish output was amped by a series of graphic films, shown on a tri-fold on-stage screen. Pornography, animal attacks, surgery and B-movies all played a role in bringing the band's horrific noises to life.

Song titles are extremely incidental for the Buttholes, especially considering most vocals are buried deep within their sonic onslaught, often running thru Haynes' cassette-enabled voice distorter or his trusty bullhorn.

But for the record, the following tunes were trotted out in no particular order: "Graveyard," "BBQ Pope," "Jimi," "Creep in The Cellar," "Bong Song," "Gary Floyd" and "Florida." And so on and so forth. One song oozed into the next so the whole performance played out like a single 90-minute mindfuck.

While the assault of the Buttholes' multimedia presentation was nothing if not intense, it was occasionally undercut by the band's blasé onstage showmanship.

Each drummer looked positively sedated behind their respective kits, and while bassist Jeff Pinkus looked the part with menacing tattoos and grinning skull T-shirt, he showed little in the way of emotion short of a few smiles and some banter with the stagehands. Likewise, guitarist Paul Leary, long the lifeblood of the band from a musical and creative perspective, was similarly austere, aside from the few songs he took lead vocals on.

That brings us back to Haynes, who was also pretty nonplussed for most of the performance. Yet the lanky frontman still cut a striking presence onstage, perhaps due to his height and some decent attempts at stage banter, including a comment about the surprising number of females in the audience.

This nonchalance wasn't really a hindrance with material like the popular family favourite "I Saw An X-Ray Of A Girl Passing Gas." These songs demand a deadpan delivery, therefore the performers' physical enthusiam was kinda inconsequential.

In short, the Butthole Surfers gave longtime fans a blotter of nostalgia. For everyone else, it was a taste of an outfit that truly exists in the margins. A ton of bands have lifted elements of the Buttholes' shtick in the last quarter century (The Flaming Lips practically based their first 10 years off 'em) but only one band truly offers their fans a brown reason to live. No matter how stinky the reality.