DNRC041 | LP | 2004 | DELETED
Rumoured to have met in the janitor’s room of a New York City apartment block at some time during the frantic haze that was 1979, The Toilet Cleaners (composed of bassist Tinlid, guitarist/vocalist Shozzy and drummer Drun) took seventeen years to put out their first album, entitled “We Are the Toilet Cleaners”. It was, in every respect, a prophetic statement of intent. On their “comeback” album “Into The Bleach”, these three crazy-dos, whose trailer-igniting antics have earned the respect of culture-jammers the world over, return to the simplicity of those days when they didn’t have an album out. In fact this record is brimming with nostalgia for an era when The Toilet Cleaners did not even exist. Kick-starting proceedings with a suitably maudlin “Pony Stories” (an abomination of a song, first made famous by the woefully-talentless Guide Ponies), Shozzy immediately illustrates at least one good reason for DNRC’s hesitation in releasing this album: the muppet can’t actually sing, and so doesn’t, making this an instrumental album, except without instruments. Second, third and fourth tracks (all untitled) pass by without any fanfare; it’s not until the industrial silence of majestic mid-album epic “Nose Stone” that any sound is heard at all from either Tinlid or Drun, in a musical statement that takes recording technology back to the Middle Ages, only Mead isn’t there to provide his wild Drkstixb solos. The second half of this astonishingly awful album never even manages to get started, and the whole affair is over before you can exclaim “Did someone press pause on the CD player?” To which one should automatically respond: “No, they didn’t – you have just heard the new Toilet Cleaners LP.” And boy are you glad that upon its release it was flushed, neither sadly nor deletedly, deep into the bowels of a bin marked “Never to be allowed to record another album again”.
