Alien Sex Fiend - Maximum Security

Released in 1985, Alien Sex Fiend's Maximum Security is recognized as a landmark,, goth-industrial album that refined their chaotic sound with more deliberate,, atmospheric, and "haunted" elements, often featuring tracks like "Dead and Buried". While early reviews found it to be a "bleak" and "monotonous" continuation, retrospectives often highlight its influential,, moody, and, theatrical soundscape, making it a favourite for many fans. Maximum Security is a big departure from the first two albums, and the least of all the Fiendworks. Bleak and predominantly slow, the material is built on machine beats (replacing Ha-Ha’s human touch) and suffers from a somewhat monotonous sameness. The title track (also released as a 45) is a notable exception.

Alien Sex Fiend - Acid Bath

By their second album “Acid Bath” the basic templates that the band would forever toy with had been set, but Alien Sex Fiend pushed and played around those boundaries all the time, even if no-one outside of their Goth-diehard fanbase noticed much. Goth’s brief time “in the sun” (not a really appropriate term given the genre, I’ll admit) was over and of course the Music Press had moved onto the next thing. As ASF had missed out on a major label contract unlike the Cult and Sisters Of Mercy, they had a little extra freedom and “Acid Bath”, though sometimes invoking the benchmarks of Gothic Rock, does contain quite a few quirks of its own.

Perhaps the horror fixation took over a little at this point, bearing in mind some of the song titles like “Dead And Re-Buried” (which sounds a bit like Suicide with its fast paced sequenced electronics and echo vocals) and “Smoke My Bones”. However “In God We Trust” is confusingly a fine creepy bit of Electropop, successfully kicking into touch all the knowledge we gained on the debut LP. “She’s A Killer” slows things down being a tense Gothic melodrama enlivened by Nik’s Cockney twang, maybe a little too “plastic vampire fangs” this time though!

Things get back on track with “Breakdown And Cry” in which Nik opines that he’s a “dinosaur of the working class”, though the Fiend were Goths they always seemed to take things lightly and with a sense of humour which I think endears them to defrocked-Goths like myself. They also manage to crank out another enduring song of theirs “E.S.T. (Trip To The Moon)” before it all ends on “Attack!!!!2”, the original version being one of the bonus tracks on this disc. Also, another of the extras on this one is a standout Psycho/Rockabilly assault “Boneshaker Baby”, possibly the pinnacle of their Cramps-obsessions and one of the last for a good while too as things were to change markedly on the next album.

Alien Sex Fiend - Who's Been Sleeping In My Brain

The title of the album, songs with names like "I'm Her Frankenstein" and "Wish I Woz a Dog," the utterly demented look of Nik Fiend in full make-up and regalia, not to mention the rest of his bandmates; the Alien Sex Fiend ethos was set from the start, in all its wiggy glory. Sometimes the sheer wackiness obscured the fact, though, that Alien Sex Fiend offered great music along with the humour, always the distinction between the truly great comedy bands and the ones that are just a bad joke to begin with. While not pretending to be pushing the cutting edge of music, Brain was still a great combination of punk's snarl, glam's giddiness, campily dramatic theatricality equal parts Alice Cooper and the Damned, and not a little bit of envelope-pushing with the band's extensive use of drum machines alongside Johnnie Ha-Ha. With Mrs. Fiend pulling a bit of a Ray Manzarek on keyboards and bass sounds, and Yaxi kicking up the guitar dust, all Nik needed to do was wrap his electrocuted-Cockney singing around it all, and the rest was genius; however, Youth provided the finishing touches as a producer, balancing crispness with just enough echo and murkiness to satisfy all sides. To its further credit, Brain wasn't just one tune repeated over and again; while Alien Sex Fiend aren't exactly ever going to be known for ballads, the rumbling Burundi-into-'50s raunch of "Wild Women" isn't the pulsing pagan psychosis of "New Christian Music," which in turn isn't the anthemic, heroic surge of "Ignore the Machine," and so forth. Though arguably Alien Sex Fiend has never really moved beyond the bounds of what it set on Brain, what the band did come up with was more than great then and now.