Frodo Goes to Washington is a better sounding title than Necrophones, don't you think? I do. Then again, I just sat through it for the third consecutive time and have lost all perspective. Third time, it turns out, is not a charm. I'm further from comprehending this album than I was prior to hearing it.

Daniel Higgs is the vocalist for Lungfish. He's got an unruly prophet-chic beard and a face stuck on "stern." Higgs looks like he might have gotten kicked out of the Brethren for taking it all too seriously. His lyrics are exceedingly imagistic, paradoxical, puzzling, sometimes fascinating, and highly likely to make you shake your head and mutter "what the fuck?"

Sometimes it seems to work, but it never makes sense. Or maybe it does, who the hell knows? I, for one, have neither the exegetical skills nor the time to delve into the kooky-ass cosmology of Higgs' head. Consider the following passage: "The kiss embalmed for state display/ The state as defined by broken minds/ The mind a concentric mirror maze/ The mirror swirling begins to drain." Scattered bits seem to cohere into themes but the connective tissue is pure schizophrenic spew. The above passage continues, "A drain sucking at its own remains/ There remains an echo migrating through space/ The echo draped in a bridal gown/ The gown reveals a fist of vapor."

The music is standard Lungfish fare but significantly darker than on previous albums. The classic Lungfish technique, in case you were worried, is quite intact. Another all-you-can-eat of re-pe-ti-tive riffery that spins like machinery, or slowly, like parodies of nature cycles, over and over with little or no change. The first time I heard Lungfish I remember expecting that the endless terrain of riffage might pay off at the song's end with some surprising climactic change. Wrong! The changes only come with the silence between tracks and the beginning of a new endless expanse of riffage.

Lungfish is also sounding more medieval than ever these days. It's up to you to decide if that's a good thing. It took a while to get that mini-Stonehenge scene from This is Spinal Tap out of my head. And when I finally did, it was instantly replaced by shitty scenes from Tolkien novels. This is punk rock for hobbits, or maybe a soundtrack to the Black Plague. It's background music to distract you from the lice multiplying in your hair, the fleas in your ass-crack, the blood-gorged tick on your eyeball, the biting draft in your roofless stone hovel, and the putrid week-old bowl of gruel you're having for dinner. Now that's rock.

This has as much to do with Higgs' singing as it does with the music. Back around the release of Songs for Walking and Talking, he pulled off hoarse punk in a fairly conventional but effective way; now he has this sort of "evil" affectation to his singing. He sounds alternately whiny and wannabe creepy, like the three witch sisters in Desmond Davis' Clash of the Titans. The result sounds menacingly like Jethro Tull: unvaryingly dirge-like and unpleasant.

All in all, though, this is just Lungfish. Necrophones won't win them new fans and it won't cost them any, I'm sure. The man with the tumbleweed convention on his face and his band of slow-motion marauders have been around 13 years and aren't hanging it up anytime soon. And if you've stuck it out through their first eight albums you're probably already eating this one up. Like the shrill cries of a baby, or the sound of shelling, or tinnitus, Necrophones gets more slightly more tolerable with every repeat listen. In the meantime, I've got a pot of Quaker Instant Gruel on simmer, and a fair wench over, so I really must be going.

-Camilo Arturo Leslie