*** Chevy Heston

FOREVER IS THE SAME THING AGAIN

(CherryDisc/Roadrunner)

The best twisted art-punk album of 1995 that most people never heard was Destroy, an 18-song convulsing spasm of scatological and grossly deviant explicit sex talk as strong as anything David Yow or Gibby Haynes ever spewed -- it resembled a passage from William Burroughs's Naked Lunch chopped and pasted over fragmented nuggets of tunefully skewed Pavementy pop. Destroy was the work of Chevy Heston, the brainchild of local drummer Zephan Courtney, and it came out on CherryDisc when that label didn't have the best distribution.

Now that CherryDisc has inked a deal with Roadrunner, Destroy is back -- from its opening blast of sewer-guitar noise, which gives way to an unsettlingly pretty little piano melody and the, ah, memorable line "The cafeteria smelled like young pussy to the new adviser," to its closing droning mantra, "I'm gonna puke your beer on you, and I'm not even finished yet." It's been compiled, along with Chevy's equally compelling if somewhat less disturbing 1996 follow-up, Come to Sterilized, on Forever Is the Same Thing Again, a single 77-minute CD with a lyric sheet, nice graphics, and enough flashes of undiluted psychosis to make the holiday season bearable.

-- Matt Ashare