Boxcar Satan

To put it mildly, critics have a hard time pithily describing San Antonio's underground-rock legends Boxcar Satan. In fact, they wind up sounding a lot less like Lester Bangs than they do Jonathan Edwards, Cotton Mather, or even Jimmy Swaggart. "The next rung down that lake of fire Leadbelly warned us about," runs one such review. "Tom Waits goes to hell to jam with a twisted devil rock punk band," goes another. "If I was cast down into hell, I'd become a stripper and the only music I would dance to would be by Boxcar Satan," chimes in a third.

Hell, we can play that game too: If Beck were the Antichrist, he would sound like Boxcar Satan . . . Boxcar Satan sounds like the soundtrack to one of Hieronymus Bosch's freakscapes transplanted to the Depression-era American South . . . If the teenage Damien from The Omen were around, he would ditch those Gregorian chants and get into Boxcar Satan. There.