Some music just isn’t made for mass consumption. That’s not the intent of the band or the result of the output. Harrisonburg, Virginia, duo Buck Gooter are a band who seem to delight in the aurally unpleasant, teaming jangly guitars with abrasive electronics as the two alliterative members, Billy Brat and six-stringer Terry Turtle, take turns yelling into the microphone. The self-released Beyond the Rotting Leaf is Buck Gooter’s 12th (!) album, and at 10 tracks/32 minutes, I find in listening that while the songs have a certain demented charm, that doesn’t exactly make the record fun to listen to.

But hey, it’s not supposed to be fun to listen to. That’s the fun of it!

One might liken some of the nonsense Buck Gooter get up to on a song like “I Wait for the Eagle” to the earliest Assjack demos, at least in terms of raw performance and production, but Buck Gooter is a duo that sounds like a duo. Even when the drum machine is in full swing and the vocals are screaming the madness of “A Million Years,” the listener is still well aware of the minimalism in the sound. Beyond the Rotting Leaf doesn’t sound fleshed out sonically. It doesn’t sound complete. It sounds post-modern, and angry, and unfriendly. It sounds like it wants to annoy you, even the cleaner vocals of earlier cut “Holy Water” seeming to poke and antagonize the eardrum.

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