One of the questions people ask when they find out a friend is starting a new band is, "Well, are you going to be a serious band or a jokey band?" Somehow, this decision determines the fate of the project from day one. Add humor and you risk losing credibility or failing outright. Serious musicians might be boring, uninspired or just plain untalented, but at least they're not making butt jokes while they're at it. Yeah, there are novelty artists that do it right, but even while someone like Weird Al might even be considered a genius, it's rare to find anyone who's pulled a life lesson or greater sense of being from one of his songs. (Don't send me e-mail about if you have, please. I don't want to know you.)

Furthermore, obscure is humor in the sub-genre of avant-garde electronic music, so stultifyingly number-happy with its fiendish grins lit only by the trusty Powerbook. And Blectum from Blechdom can sound like that-- several tracks on Haus de Snaus take the esoteric high road-- but there's something more to it. Kevin and Blevin Blectum (both girls, for the record) are confrontational, theatrical, and absurd. And somehow, these three elements augment their appeal, drawing Wesley Willis-weaned punk kids and icy digitalis alike to their records and shows.

Haus de Snaus is a chronological compilation of the duo's debut EP Snauses and Mallards, and its successor De Snaunted House. A serious majority of Snauses and Mallards has a sucking and splatting quality to it, where one channel whoops to the other's tick, playing back and forth in the stereo field. Of these tracks, "Shithole" pulls out the harshest Kid606 trash-style sample of the whole album, which generally stays in the dark, tranquil nether-regions typically reserved for ambient Coil.

The opening of De Snaunted Haus is a testament to Blectum from Blechdom's amazing growth. The first three tracks run together, distressed but with a sort of collage-oriented organization, like cut-up styles of White Noise or even the United States of America. This is when the whimsy, which lays low for the majority of Snauses and Mallards, takes full force. "Going Postal (It Is the Right Time)" combines a weird lounge-waltz with evil undercurrents and long-lost radio vocals. The tight seduction of "Right Time, Right Place" works from a stolen hip-hop beat as rather unmelodic blocks of sound bump against one another, brutalizing the rhythm as it pushes through the song.

Then, terrifyingly enough, begin the skits. The Girls Blectum send their voices through pitch-scramblers and backwards reverb and take on roles of little boys, evil snauses and impatient mothers. Though not funny in the traditional sense, the pieces are strangely disturbing, especially placed between the lo-tech dance tracks that form the majority of the album. In lieu of Snauses' ambience comes mania-- frazzled tracks sway out of control, interspersed with funny-the-first-time tales of missing toes, bloody messes and angry mommies.

The final track, "In Case You Forget, We Talked on This Record," perhaps calls to critics wanting more from the mellow facelessness of Snauses and Mallards, and perhaps projects others' annoyance with the "wasted" album time devoted to the duo's rather mundane playacting. But if anything, Blectum from Blechdom show with this release that their growth isn't so much one of maturity as it is of a willingness to experiment; one of the two new bonus tracks tacked onto the end of Haus de Snaus, "In Search of the Non-Stop Party Planet," goes Autechre just to say it can, sucking in light and space until finally collapsing into an all-out, digital breakdown.

Though just a sampling of Blechdom's early material, Haus de Snaus does show a lot of promise for what the duo could eventually become. More recent works, like "Always Frank," their contribution to the awesome Tigerbeat6, Inc. compilation, see them headed in a direction where their chaotic sense of humor melds perfectly with more updated electronics and even guitars. So while they're just a really good novelty band now, there could well be a time in the not-so-distant future that sees Kevin and Blevin making music as insane as their comic personas. And that will be a good day.

-Daphne Carr, December 7th, 2001