Human Snakeskin

(25 minutes, 2017)

A white trash dominatrix uses gag-gifts as sex toys; a meth-head's genitals are infested with larva; a Scandanavian foreign exchange student gets eaten by an escalator, sexily; a church becomes the scene of a shit-smeared fuck-fest.

Interspersed with these paraphiliac lust songs are loosely autobiographical tracks about being a fucking loser. And Mitch Hedberg comes back from the grave to ssssuck the drugs from your glands.

This album was a big jump in quality over the first two. The song composition was getting more complex (meaning: I had learned that percussion needs to consist of more than a bassdrum and crash cymbals) and I was getting more elaborate with the samples, creating new sound-effects using canned spaghetti, old videogame consoles, and my dick. It also helped that I could record vocals in a bedroom instead of a moving vehicle.

Thematically, it's a weird mess. I had what I thought was a coherent aesthetic idea in mind while I was writing the lyrics, which had a lot of visual elements to it: cheap wood panelling, old-lady hair frozen solid with hairspray, and flabby, stretchmarked white skin. It was an idea of bygone white trash grossness that hadn't survived into the social media era where our photos can be scrutinized by people we barely know. None of this comes through in the music at all.

The cover art and title are based on a personal anecdote. There was a Boy Scout event in the summer of 2001, with local troops "camping" together near the football stadium of our mediocre state university. There was a scummy little pond with a boat dock nearby, and I spotted a used condom floating in the water. I caught it on the end of a twig and then carried it over to a Scout Leader to ask him what kind of snakeskin it was.

"That's a human snakeskin," he said, clearly pissed off by my disgusting behavior and the smart-ass look on my face. "Put it back!"

On the cover photo, the used condom is being lifted from a dirty bathtub on the end of a plastic fork. There's a set of Billy-Bob Teeth in the soapdish.

TRACK LIST

1. Summon the Destructor

Read the lyrics here.

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