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Jack Terricloth once likened playing in a band to being married and having a full-time job. Hence, his World/Inferno Friendship Society fashion themselves a kooky circus punk co-op, not a band. Last year, the Brooklyn-centered jolly mob scrapped an album release, and three prominent members (including Dresden Dolls drummer Brian Viglione) tendered their resignations, so it's hard to not read between the lines of The A&E's romping first track, "I Am Sick of People Being Sick of My Shit." Perhaps World/Inferno ran into the kind of problems often experienced by, well, bands - and when musicians collaborate and perform together, it makes a band, regardless of how it's gussied up. To say all that caused The A&E to fall short of the skyscraping precedents World/Inferno had set would be jumping to conclusions. This offering is slower and darker than their previous records, and bummerdom is not their strong suit. (Although the acerbic anti-love song "The Apple Was Eve" would suggest otherwise.) On lounge brooder "Canonize Philip K. Dick, Okay?", Terricloth lulls a warning: "You can't change the system. The system changes you." At optimum capacity, World/Inferno don't give a fuck about the system, and they wouldn't bother to sing about it.
