Released: March 30, 1992
White Zombie spends the opening of “Welcome to Planet Motherfucker/Psychoholic Slag” throwing warped music, dialogue, explosions, and guitar noise into the room before the band settles on a riff you can grab onto. Even then, the song keeps breaking apart: shouted commands, beatnik poetry, a one-note churn, and another riff. La Sexorcisto fills nearly every open space with some new piece of junk. So what stops it from becoming a collection of riffs with old movies pasted over them?
The answer starts with Sean Yseult and Ivan de Prume. They give every song a pulse strong enough to hold the extra noise. Yseult often doubles J. Yuenger’s guitar, but her bass remains a thick presence of its own, especially when he cuts a chord short or moves into a lead. De Prume plays a firm backbeat, using quick kick patterns and compact tom fills to push the band into the next bar. On “Thunder Kiss ’65,” the main guitar figure lands because the rhythm section owns the space between its chord punches. “Black Sunshine” slows that approach down, letting the bass and drums walk beneath the chug after Iggy Pop’s opening narration.
Yuenger’s guitar is busy around the edges and blunt at the centre. He recorded the album in standard tuning with one Charvel, then used overdubs to make the riffs wider. The main “Thunder Kiss ’65” figure alternates muted low-string hits with short chord bursts, while the wah-soaked lead scratches across the top. “Soul-Crusher” keeps changing the guitar’s job, moving from a lurching central riff to tighter muted runs and noisy lead fragments. Each riff has a clear rhythmic shape, which matters on an album with so much happening around it.
The movie samples obey that rhythm too. Voices often enter at a section change, almost like cues from the control room. The opener drops to a near one-note pattern beneath beat poetry from High School Confidential. On “Cosmic Monsters Inc.,” dialogue from the Plan 9 from Outer Space trailer is timed like another vocal part. The two 24-second “Knuckle Duster” pieces and the brief “One Big Crunch” break up the longer songs like someone grabbing the radio dial. They disrupt the listening experience without pulling it apart.
Rob Zombie approaches the lyrics as another form of collage. Engines, devils, sex, speed, and outer-space debris flash past in clipped images, with little concern for how they connect on paper. His delivery makes the connections. He crowds syllables around the snare in “Thunder Kiss ’65,” then clears room for the blunt “yeah” responses. In “Black Sunshine,” the title anchors a stream of car worship and apocalyptic road language. His rasp sits dry and close in Andy Wallace’s mix, giving even the strangest phrases a firm rhythmic edge.
Most of the songs run close to five minutes, though few follow a straight verse-chorus path. Riffs stop for spoken fragments, breakdowns reduce the guitar to a single repeated pattern, and solos flare up before the main figure returns. “I Am Legend” settles into a slower, stalking repetition. “Warp Asylum” stretches the formula into a six-minute crawl, ending with a voice suggesting that repeated plays might finally produce understanding. Wallace keeps the snare, bass, guitar, and vocal distinct through all of it.
So what keeps La Sexorcisto together? The band’s sense of time. Yseult and de Prume establish the foundation, Yuenger leaves openings inside the riffs, Wallace preserves those spaces, and Rob fills them with dialogue and vocal noise. The horror clips supply the scenery. The band decides exactly where each piece belongs.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
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