Noodle Muffin

Pissed-off plunder phonic protest rock is back, y’all! And Noodle Muffin are right there in the thick of it, lobbing jacked beats, cruel jokes and ugly truths helter-skelter like tear gas canisters at a WTO protest. They’re from Southern California, but their worldview is anything but sunny and mellow — the humour behind their digital demolition of the Bush administration’s crimes against humanity is as black as it is biting. The Noodle Muffin crew specialise in clever drag-and-drop sample collages in the mould of pioneering noise terrorists Negativland and the KLF, slicing and dicing pop culture’s back catalogue with both middle-digits aloft to the copyright cops. But even though most of Regime Change’s riffs and melodies are second-hand, the dense mash-up-palooza chops and screws its source material to the point where it almost passes for new. No one makes it out of this sonic quagmire alive; "Blazing Empire” is a nasty collision of cut’n’paste Bushisms, snippets from Blazing Saddles and the Darth Vader theme, while "The Dogs of War” butchers and flame-broils sacred cows over a scuffed-up riff swiped from Tones on Tail’s "Go!” while sizzurp-slowed chunks of the Beastie Boys’ "Alive” punctuate the mix. The gimmick starts to wears thin mid-way through once the NM boys start recycling old ideas, but for the most part, this splinter cell’s attack is clean, surgical and lethal. Like Fahrenheit 9/11, but with funky breaks.