It begins with a disgruntled chant that sounds like “Kimchi! Kimchi!”, as if bleary-eyed denizens of suburban food courts across the land had risen up, finally, with sour demands to match the fare on offer. The song is called ‘Wog Rocks Your Liver’ – and that’s a threat, not a promise. Alongside ‘Garlic and Gangrene’ and ‘Jewish Chicken Killers’ it suggests that wOg are more than ready to play the poisonous bacterium, burrowing down gleefully inside the body politic.
wOg is Robbie Avenaim and Ray Ahn, who between them have clocked up several decades worth of cantankerous noise-making; Avenaim mainly as an experimental percussionist and Ahn as a member of garage punk iconoclasts The Hard Ons. The pair have shoved all that energy into a very compact space: we are wOg is barely fifteen minutes in length but it’s as dirty as gravel rash. The bass is farting and huge, particularly on ‘Garlic and Gangrene’, the final track, while the drums are all splenetic snare and thrashing cymbals. Ill-mannered and hilarious (I’ll pay any record with a track called ‘Godzilla vs. the Immigration Department’), trashy and impotent, the overall effect is like spraying mud down your walls and enjoying it.
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