Flipper - Sex Bomb

(Subterranean, 1981)

The goofy single! The mindnumbingly-repetitious single! The famous single! And why not? “Sex Bomb” is a masterpiece of half-assed, drunk-assed songwriting, with chunky, noisy Flipperisms underneath happy/maniacal whooping and hollering that mainly consists of the line “SHE’S A SEX BOMB, BABY! YEAH!!” over and over. Stupid. And perfect. I actually hear a lot of David Baker’s live style (see: “Very Sleepy Rivers”) in the way Will Shatter grunts and screams here, bending the line to make it sound new each time he lets it loose. And even if the joke gets old after about 60 seconds, the inarticulate hardcore lunk (Bruce Lose) who stammers over the standard-issue thunka-thunka backing of “Brainwash” is extremely funny once or twice. Complete lyrics: “Um… OK, like… see, there’s this… and… but, and then uh… nevermind… forget it… you wouldn’t understand anyway.” Too bad the band decided to loop the same snippet over and over again for six wrist-slit-inducing minutes! OK, OK, it’s also kinda funny that the disc ends with a lockgroove on the final “forget it… you wouldn’t understand” for maximum annoyance.

There appear to be many sleeve variations, most (all?) of them involving simply the “dead fish” logo and band name hand-stamped on white paper in some fashion. Collect ’em all!