Bride Of Firesign, The

Bride Of Firesign, The by FIRESIGN THEATRE

During the freewheeling 1960s, the Firesign Theatre's brand of surreal, stream-of-consciousness humor was as much a part of the psychedelic landscape as acid rock. Blending puns, non sequiturs, and literary allusions, the heady and often absurd narratives were rife with multiple interpretations, depending on the listener's degree of altered consciousness. Bride of Firesign reunites the original members--Phillip Austin, Phillip Proctor, David Ossman, and Peter Bergman--in a program equally divided between "Something Old, Something Nude" and "Something Buried, Something Rude." The first section brings back Firesign Theatre stalwart Nick Danger in a noirish, tongue-in-cheek "L-O-S- T G-A-L-S" and opens with a lengthy paean to the male appendage, entitled "Pulling It Off As a Man," which accounts for the parental advisory warning. The second section takes on contemporary subjects like biogenetics and stem-cell research, giving them an appropriately ghoulish and paranoid spin on "Dr. Fireside's Plastic Beauty Saloon" and "Low-Glow Land." The Firesign Theatre's gift for creating offbeat characters expounding absurdist points-of-view is as evident as ever, though their radio-show format necessarily relegates them to another era. --Wally Shoup