It is both a treat and an ordeal to review something like 2nd Grand Constitution And Bylaws for a number of reasons. Firstly, the parlance of the music critic is either tired cliché or outlandish verbosity. An album such as this leaves no room for middle-ground action, so I’m afraid it’s time for the verbose.

>Secret Chiefs 3> are also known by pedantic train-spotters as the members of Mr Bungle minus the front man Mike Patton. Not the most accurate description yet it will suffice for the layman, and needless to say they are a skilled bunch of musicians. 2nd Grand Constitution…is best summed up as a left-field recording that mixes middle eastern styles with metal, experimental noise and wraps it up in psuedo-mystical overtones which tie the project together as a whole.

If it all sounds a bit familiar and you can’t place the name, flashback a few years to the ABC Saturday morning music show Recovery, where SC3 played live and proceeded to feverishly tour Australia like some Swedish backpacker on crystal meth.

Opening track Rose Garden of Mystery lays down the middle eastern mystery vibe, whilst Waves of Blood segues with almost surf guitar madness into Broken Glass Hearse. The track SC3 played on recovery, Renunciation, follows and I am blown away in retrospective delight at the crescendo of Indian sitars and ska guitar, of distorted flute and percussion. Definitely a stand-out track and worth the price of admission alone.

Things get almost feverish with Jabalqa, introducing an electronic feel as the Amen breaks crashes around Indian scale arpeggios, which contrasts to Myra Pyar Shalimar, which I can only describe as a song that The Shadows might have written if they took acid and grew up in Pakistan.

Things get incendiary on the Indian electro tip from Jabarsa to the closing track Hurqalya, and I can only warn the listener to keep one hand on the volume dial at all times, unless you particularly enjoy the sound of compressed white noise blasting your eardrums.

Which brings me to the difficult ‘summing up’ bit, the choice of cliché or extended verbal wank-fest to try to put such an erratic album into a neat little descriptive by-line and get a little pat on my head by the editor. Well, I’m not going to. At best, I recommend you pick this album up to get a listen to the left field explorative antics of some extremely talented musicians, and at worst I can appeal to the lowest common denominators and exclaim, as I heard some people do at a SC3 gig at the old Playroom (Gold Coast, Qld) many years ago… ‘whoa man, that’s fucking weird!’