Camper Van Beethoven - Camper Van Beethoven CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

In fact, with an odd array of sounds inspired by everything from polka music to Led Zeppelin to the Butthole Surfers, CVB spoofs every musical movement of the past twenty years to forge an antimovement of its own.

The album opens with "Good Guys and Bad Guys," a song full of smooth harmonies and layered guitar chords that could be a folk-rock anthem in the new-American-sincerity vein. But as soon as the song starts to sound a bit too meaningful, CVB throws us off with some deadpan meaninglessness ("Just be glad you live here in America/Just relax and be yourself/'Cause if you didn't live in America/You'd probably live somewhere else"). And while the rockabilly "Joe Stalin's Cadillac" mentions enough random big shots (Stalin, LBJ, Somoza) to add up to a political statement, it's about nothing more than driving around the block. By the end of the song, the singer is on the verge of an existential crisis, but he's too spaced-out to deal with it: "Gonna drive my Cadillac off a bridge/If I can find a bridgeà.Has anybody seen the bridge?"

Punk bands reacted against the supergroup egomania of endless guitar solos by playing short, quick songs; Camper Van Beethoven goes for the same effect by exaggerating and distorting the form. The band's cover of Pink Floyd's psychedelic instrumental "Interstellar Overdrive" takes a journey into musical oblivion and yawns when it gets there. Be warned, though: with song titles like "Stairway to Heavan [sic]," this is an album that cannot be fully appreciated without a subtle sense of sarcasm.

While the LP lacks a lyric sheet, the back cover contains some handwritten notes about the participants (Christopher Molla "accidentally won a Madonna look-a-like contest again" and Eugene Chadbourne left "one dirty sock in Albuquerque") that will make listeners feel like they're in on some huge private joke. But Camper Van Beethoven is too talented not to be taken seriously-especially because its members are dead serious about not being dead serious about anything serious. Except themselves.

ELIZABETH WURTZEL