Guitarist Bruce Anderson, a founder of MX-80 Sound and more recently a member of that band's O-Type and Gizzards offshoots with Brutality producer Dale Sophiea, truly brings the noise on his full-length 1995 album, a compilation of the two solo cassettes plus ten minutes' worth of nation-named tracks ("Lebanon" and "Greece," which diverge from the remainder by having Sophiea's bass and sample contributions) from a 1986 O-Type release. Half the places visited on Brutality are wordless layered 4-track guitar cacophonies — impressive in their density but not good for much beyond emergency lease-breaking campaigns. The remaining spots on this obscure self-indulgence are spare one-or-two-guitar improvisations that sometimes incorporate Frippertronic sustain melodies but rarely surpass the imaginative structure level of random warm-up exercises.

Having dropped the "Sound" from its name (thereby encouraging confusion with Virginia garage-blues quartet the M-80's), MX-80 — which began in Indiana in the mid-'70s and eventually relocated to San Francisco following a hookup with the Residents' Ralph Records label — has remained active in the '90s. In addition to singles and a 1990 instrumental album, the band recently saw to the reissue of its original catalogue: 1980's Out of the Tunnel and 1981's Crowd Control were combined on CD as Out of Control, while 1976's seven-song Big Hits 7-inch and 1977's Hard Attack were packaged together with a bonus outtake from the latter.