Rediscovering Gwar

I've never been and probably never will be the biggest Gwar fan in the world, but I owned and enjoyed both Scumdogs Of The Universe and America Must Be Destroyed on cassette in high school. I picked up a CD version of Scumdogs many years ago, but had largely forgotten about America Must Be Destroyed. Decibel recently did an overview of the history of Gwar and that reminded me how much I liked the song "The Road Behind" from that album. I was going to pick up just that song, but then read a review of the album on Allmusic.com that said the album was actually pretty good. That didn't seem far off from how I remembered it being, so I found the album for around $5 used (including shipping and handling) on Amazon and snatched it up. As it turns out, this album has quite surprisingly really stood the test of time. "Ham On The Bone", "Have You Seen Me?" "The Morality Squad" and of course "The Road Behind" are just some of the highlights of what is a thoroughly enjoyable heavy metal record. Gwar is often written off because of their costumes and alien gimmick (and probably rightfully so), but this is one album where they proved that they could actually play and write great songs. This isn't going to all of the sudden turn me into a huge Gwar fan, but I am quite happy to have this and Scumdogs Of The Universe in my record collection.

"The Road Behind" (check out the random cameo from Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers in the beginning of the video):