SXSW Profiles

Therapy?, Gallery Lombardi Lounge, 11pm Thursday

Best known stateside for the alterna-rock single "Screamager," off 1994's gold-certified Troublegum, Therapy? frontman Andy Cairns and company have apparently spent the intervening years trying to figure out how to get back to the rough-and-tumble basics of their first outing, 1991's creepy, crunchy Babyteeth. For Cairns, that was easier said than done.

"After Troublegum, we lost our a way a little bit," admits Cairns. "We made Infernal Love [1995] and Semi-Detached ['98] after that, and it got to the point where we didn't really know what we wanted. We'd get A&R guys coming to the studio after we'd only been in there four days and whatnot. I suppose there was a bit of disillusionment in the whole alterna-rock genre to a certain extent."

That disillusionment only worsened when the band's longtime label A&M folded, leaving Semi-Detached high and dry and virtually unheard of outside critics' circles. Already steeped in enough Irish angst to stun a platoon of lesser bands, Therapy? opted to burn the brass ring and serve up, once and for all, the music in their hearts. Of course by this time, their hearts had become nasty black pits of seething rage and vile malfeasance.

The resulting Suicide Pact -- You First on Ark 21 is unlike any Therapy? you're likely to find on a registered state medico's couch. Pact... isn't an album, it's a beating. Filled with crunchy hooks and purposely radio-unfriendly slabs of sleazy riffage straight out of Lemmy Kilminster's School of Rock n' Warts, it's the sound of a band falling in love with their Marshalls all over again.

"The thing is, we're 10 years together this March, and I think if we hadn't made this record, we'd have gotten so jaded and so disillusioned that we would have just packed it in instead of opting for the usual shit," posits Cairns. "We really needed to shake things up a little bit more, to make it fun again."

Not the therapy your mother advised, Cairns' crew slash-and-burn their Troublegummed past and gleefully sever your ears in the process, a short, sharp, shock of the new that leaves your head ringing for hours afterward.

"It's not very marketable, but it is very rock & roll," says Cairns.

Since when was the good shit marketable, anyway?