Forget about Captain Beefheart and Right Said Fred -- the Boredoms are the strangest and most important avant-pop act to ever worm its way onto a major label. In the '90s, Reprise released such spazzed-out, cartoon-punk weirdness as Pop Tatari and Chocolate Synthesizer, while the Boredoms opened for Nirvana, setting fire to hockey rinks and shaking Teen America out of its strip-mall daze. Of course, the chairman's white-collar thugs soon removed these renegades from corporate headquarters, but that didn't matter. The Boredoms had already entered their cocoon stage: the Super Roots series -- eight limited-edition EPs that saw them gradually transform into space-rock shamans.
Naturally, the early volumes (one through four) closely resemble the original Boredoms: ingeniously constructed collages exploding with shrieking girls, squealing synthesizers, stuttering grooves, and temper-tantrum noise. By five, however, the band starts investigating hyper-kaleidoscopic jamscapes like "Go!!!!!," a manic, electro-chunk of 21st-century psych-rock looking toward the group's 1998 masterwork Super Ae.
