God Lives Underwater
God Lives Underwater (Onion/American)
by Marc Hirsh
God Lives Underwater
God Lives Underwater (Onion/American)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in the Rice Thresher, March 24, 1995
God help us. The computer backlash has begun.
I'm convinced that this is how it's happening: all that nonsense in Terminator about computers becoming sentient beings and initiating a global assault on humanity isn't a joke. It's real. Only it's not nuclear weapons that the Information Superhighway is hurling at us. It's music.
It's the only way to explain God Lives Underwater, the latest offering from Onion Records, a subsidiary of American Recordings, which, perhaps not coincidentally, is the only record company to advertise its email address on all its albums. No human could do this to his own kind.
The story they've concocted is this: teenage wunderkinds Jeff Turzo and David Reilly liked to play around with computers and guitars and worked out a way to mix the two for fun and profit.
I don't buy it. Are we really to believe that these two high school chuckleheads nabbed a manager by sending him a package of poisonous spiders in the mail? I think there's a place for people like this. It's called jail.
No, with that and other obvious goofs in their bio, it's clear that some nonhuman entity created this band from the depths of its circuitry and is trying to pull one over on us humans to speed up the apocalypse.
The first sign of impending doom is the arrival of God Lives Underwater, the "first" (it says here hopefully) EP. Nine Inch Nails and Jesus Jones have done the computer-based rock music thing before (and better). The double-tracked harmony vocals are taken from Alice In Chains, who did it first (and better). The lyrics come from the notebooks of every high schooler who's ever thought they were a poet. Combine these and cower in fear.
The song titles, of course, show the typical angst and despair. "Drag Me Down." "Lonely Again." "No More Love." "Waste Of Time." And, the crowning touch: "Nothing." How nihilistic. Important issues all, demonstrating that we are in the presence of Deep Thinkers.
So be warned that the computers are about to take over and Internet is now your enemy. If it could hatch a plot as diabolical as God Lives Underwater, it clearly has no conscience. Start digging that underground bunker now.