One of my fondest memories is of a trip I took to San Francisco a couple of summers back. I spent a night at a friend's flat on McAllister Street, drinking beer and eating delicious squid-filled okonomiyake prepared by two Japanese exchange students my pal Mike had met during his tenure as an English tutor. Around midnight, Mike announced that it was time to cross the street to visit a little-known San Francisco landmark, something he called "The Gothest Bedroom in North America." We rounded up the troops-- about 10 of us including Mike's roommates, my traveling companions, and the Japanese exchange students-- and traveled across the street into a building exactly like the one we'd left. None of us had any idea, really, where we were headed.

As it turned out, "The Gothest Bedroom in North America" was not a museum or even a club, but exactly what its name implied. It belonged to an acquaintance of Mike's, and was located on the second floor in a very nice flat. The majority of the flat gave off only the slightest whiff of Goth and could never prepare our party for the wonders that lay ahead in the Bedroom itself.

The room was a living encyclopedia of all things Goth: thick velvet curtains and swag, wrought iron chandelier, canopy bed with bondage harness, free-standing bondage cross, skulls, small animals preserved in formaldehyde, Joel-Peter Witkin monograph, complete works of Poe, complete discography of Christian Death, and so on. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves held a wealth of disturbing gewgaws. Grisly images abounded. A faint smell of roses and decaying what-have-you hung in the air. It was textbook, perfect. While most of us stood and silently nodded our appreciation, agreeing that is was all remarkably cozy, the Japanese exchange students flipped out. Mike had succeeded in teaching them very little English, but even their native tongue failed them as they stood clutching each other in the middle of the room, trying to avoid touching even the floor. Piece by piece, they pointed at everything in sight, letting out with each point a shrill and terrified scream.

Were I to make a movie of my life, the soundtrack to this perfect moment of pure comedy would be Two Ton Boa's "Bleeding Heart." Their dense and plodding goth-rock epic would be the just the thing to underscore our poor exchange students' hilarious culture shock. Imagine the guitars grinding away as the two pivot slowly in the center of the room. As a cutaway reveals a spider crawling slowly across a wax-caked windowsill, Sherry Fraser intones some woeful line like, "There's leagues of scheming sirens/ Plying you with witchy sighings/ Praying for a taste of your sweet..." A swirling camera would zoom in on the students' horrified, darting eyes, and the scene would end in a jump-cut just as the song's second verse reached its climax: a crescendoing chorus of eldritch laughter.

I shit you not: this record's got a crescendoing chorus of eldritch laughter. It's that really articulated, evil sort of "ha ha ha" laughter, with Fraser multi-tracked into a whole cackling coven. And that's absolutely the high point here.

Most of these five songs are bland, overlong crunchers, the bulk of which feature the sort of tiresome lyrical portraits of occult happenings and intravenous drug use. The music itself is classically dense, distorted power-trio stuff, and endlessly repetitive. "Puppet Charm," for example, limps along for 4½ minutes on the same three-note riff (precisely the same three notes, incidentally, that form the base of the Throwing Muses' infinitely more interesting "River"). The above-mentioned "Bleeding Heart" is like an Anne Rice character (or novel) in its seeming immortality: at an ungodly nine minutes, it's seven too long.

It's not all drudgery, though. "Comin' Up from Behind" is actually pretty catchy, delivered in a cabaret style that recalls Oingo Boingo taking on Cab Calloway in "Forbidden Zone." The EP's closer, "Have Mercy," features an interesting mid-tempo Joy Division-meets-PJ Harvey feel-- unfortunately, it never really metastasizes into the satisfying pop song it could have been.

At worst, Two Ton Boa are essentially Mary's Danish reworked for the Poppy Z. Brite set. If you're the type who finds a music box creepy and a vine-covered, deserted church sexy, you'll want to pick up this record. If not, you're advised to skip it. And if you happen to be a Japanese exchange student, a jump-cut will soon find you fleeing the Bedroom in terror, tumbling down two flights of stairs, running pell-mell and screaming down the streets of San Francisco.

-Zach Hooker