Stone Operation

The Stone Operation is a 15th century hypothetical Dutch procedure involving extracting the stone of madness from a patient's head in order to make them normal. Flemish painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel The Elder have depicted it in their works. On the latest Mischief Brew record, ironically, the surgery has been refused. Over the past 11 years, Mischief Brew's music has been difficult to corral into one genre (although conveniently, Folk Punk tends to be the common summary). You've got the Gypsy/Pirate rhythms of Smash the Windows to the raspy anarcho-folk of Songs From Under the Sink to a variety of odds and ends - and let us not forget Fight Dirty, last year's collaboration with Guignol, which can easily be described as Turkish-flavored Klezmer/Gypsy-swing circus punk with an Iron Maiden cover. This new offering continues that pattern, but cranks it up thrice as loud. In a church-turned-studio way outside of Philadelphia, the songs were recorded loud and fast on tour-battered gear, fiercely strummed banjos, and trashy drum kits more suited for a fairground organ. All the flare of past Mischief Brew recordings is there: junk percussion, drunken mandolin-playing, Carnivalesque imagery in a lyric book that strangely resembles an early edition of Grimm's Household Tales. But those are just spices and ornaments, not the main dish - and the main course on The Stone Operation is raging hot. Here we have 11 (er, 12) songs about drunken trespassers, street-performers, Trick-or-Treaters, train hoppers, jugglers, clowns, card-playing ghosts...and watching the TV show Dallas during Soviet rule in Romania. If it is a Folk Punk record, then it may be the first one to have a track reserved exclusively for cowbell... or, to use the word Caco-daemon in the lyrics... or, to have a song with a doom metal outro...