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'Though I've returned with my head hung low and my palms pressed flatly, upwardly together, in due time I plan on leaving again and when I do my fingers will fold to form a gun and flip to fuck a chorus of pussies who still answer to that brilliant thought that revealed itself to them in the third grade. What was it again?' Chris Leo's return, aided and abetted by fellow ex-Van Pelt-er Toko Yasuda, is an uncompromising, vehement document made all the more bruising by the simultaneous loss of soothing melodic counterpoint that was The Van Pelt's stock-in-trade. Leo's musicality is no less imaginative; more a sonic parallel for his socio-political forthrightness â?? 'I hate people because the compromise I would have to make to like them, I believe (though I may believe falsely), would cause me more pain than the loneliness and disgust that at times is all consuming.' Yasuda's contributions seem naïve and child-like in comparison ('A boy meets a girl, a girl meets a boy ... when I gave up and smiled the words shined and died in my hands') acting as interludes between the angst-ridden, self-doubting anger of Leo's manifesto. Outspoken and original.

Matt Dornan
CWAS #4 - Winter 1998/9 - The Lost Issue

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