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Steven Jesse Bernstein was a vital poet capable of producing unsettling, unnerving and brutally honest works. In this way, he was a natural heir to the late great William S. Burroughs, but Bernstein's suicide in the early 1990s squashed that hope. Fortunately, he has left us with a powerful album entitled Prison, which finds him reciting his words -- venom and bile and wicked irony literally dripping from his lips -- as producer/arranger Steve Fisk (Nirvana, Screaming Trees, Beat Happening) concocts quirky Experimental music similar in spirit to Soul Coughing's jazz/indie/dance amalgam. Wisely, Fisk never allows the heady, dense music to get in Bernstein's way, and his acerbic lines and singular delivery come blazing through: "And the cops squashed in their cars / Gurgling into their dead microphones / An ocean of mud." Bernstein will be remembered for his antagonistic, image-laden and utterly unique torrent of words.
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