Lost My Brain! (Once Again)

Cyco mio Miko… you perennially exuberant, overtly enthusiastic, hard-working minstrel! You can’t simply sit down and enjoy the fruit of your labour… you have to keep creating in order to give more freedom to your incessant artistic urges! Peppering the 90’s with suicidal thoughts and infectious grooves wasn’t enough for you… there had to be another project founded to help you exorcise…

hm, I’m not quite sure what Mr. Mike Muir wants to exorcise here… kudos for the fact that this album doesn’t sound like the Suicidals’ or the Infectious Grooves works, but it’s really hard to see it as a high form of art. On the contrary, this is the least serious stint of the perennially merry and optimistic troubadour; it’s nothing like the thrash/crossover antics of his main band, and it’s not really close to the bass-guided metallic funkisms of the Grooves. It distantly resembles the latter’s repertoire at times, though, which shouldn’t be a surprise as half of the musicians involved in this cycotic endeavour hail from there.

The grooves here are not infectious, mind you; in fact, there are very few grooves, to be honest, cause by-and-large this is a punk album. So the “punk” tag given here is justified, yes, but the “thrash” one should be removed immediately… even the The Offspring efforts from around the same time can more easily pass for thrash than this. Muir simply unwinds here with frivolous carefree tunes like “I Love Destruction” and “All I Ever Get”, the faster-paced moments (“F.U.B.A.R.”, the Motorhead-esque joy “Gonna Be Alright”) inevitably bringing the winds of hardcore/crossover, respectively reminding of the Suicidals’ debut, Muir putting all the ingredients together for the execution of a few more eventful roller-coasters (“Save a Peace for Me”, the alternative semi-balladic parade “Ain't Mess'n Around”). This is so unpretentious and simplistic that one won’t help but start jumping around on catchy sing-along punkers like the title-track and “It's Always Something”, leaving all his/her cares and troubles behind for a bit less than an hour…

yes, it’s a lengthy recording for the style it represents, but this is pretty much the only difference between it and the hordes of Green Jellys, Green Days, Offsprings, Rancids, and Pennywises as Muir gleefully and nonchalantly adds one more entry into the 90’s punk revival movement. It’s hardly necessary, though, as by 1995 it already became quite clear that said movement would be the main disturber of the groovy/post-thrashy hegemony even without hyper-active ex-thrashers’ participation. It requires little to no musical proficiency to come up with such a goofy albeit highly optimistic collection, and although it might make the punk veterans take the dusty leather, Sex Pistols-patched jackets down from the attic, it won’t exactly inspire them to run to the nearest barber’s and shave their heads in the mythical mohawk style.

I was probably going to give this effort a higher score if it wasn’t for its detrimentally contaminating impact; once Muir summoned the other Suicidals for another stint in the late-90’s, it was all about punk and hardcore for a string of efforts… it seemed as though the lads wouldn’t be able to shake off their very roots, and wouldn’t be able to come up with something more sensible. Cyco Miko didn’t contribute much to the scheduled awakening with the “The Mad Mad Muir Musical Tour (Part One)” compilation which contained unreleased tracks from all the three camps; but at least this stretching on three fronts didn’t sound as patchy. Then the world went mad which in its turn prompted the gang to pull themselves together and reflect it in “World Gone Mad” (2016), a pretty decent, also much more serious offering; but then it all went down well above ground zero with “Still Cyco Punk After All These Years” two years later… yep, a remastered version of the album reviewed here… enough said.

Cyco mio Miko, you cunning devious, practical jokey, self-repetitive conman! You can’t stop re-regurgitating old shabby, impossibly punky tunes! Lights… camera… stagnation! The art of rebellion? I don’t know… at least I don’t have those impertinent suicidal thoughts anymore… perhaps this obsolete, painfully familiar cyco therapy works somehow… I don’t know.