Featuring Marcos Fernandes, Fayd Ogolon, Meyer Hirsch, and Eric G. Hensel, Eat Plastic is an album that exists somewhere between 1960s free jazz, 1970s garage funk, 1980s activist rock, 1990s alternative rock, and the early 2000s San Diego experimental music scene.

Reviewers, fans, and detractors have compared the album to The Mothers of Invention, Sonny Sharrock, Primus, and Captain Beefheart.

On the original “Eat Plastic” album, it is apparent that Ashes filled his head with the sounds of early Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, before graduating onto the likes of The Residents. The opening instrumental “Stop and Go Traffic” is an excellent FZ style marimba and percussion-led jazz-funk workout; the extended introduction to “The Revolution Is Making Me Dizzy” grooves along in similar vein. Meanwhile, “The CEO” features rapidly changing time signatures, before Ashes gives us his opening vocal shot, an impossibly deep and gravelly Beefheartean baritone, which includes one very long sustained bass note. The lyrics of this song (“I am the CEO / and I’m gonna whip your ass”), “Food In My Gut” (“Sometimes I wish that I was dead / instead I crawl back in my head”), and “Commercials” (“Here’s some commercials, here’s something else / here’s some commercials, you stupid ass”), contain post-modern satire for the working classes, the former featuring funky bass playing from Max Vazin, the latter some gloriously edgy guitar riffing. “Amtrak Out of Orange County” is a nightmare train journey, with noisy and atonal electronic soundscapes courtesy of Fayd. By comparison, “Goddess/Godless” is a gentle (if markedly twisted) guitar and piano ballad, with one reassuring and repeated verse: “I will have no fear / with the goddess lying next to me”. The spoken word delivery and avant-garde backing track of “Lemming Sunset“, the final track on the original album, calls to mind Sun Ra reciting cosmic utterances over the top of Rick Wright‘s “Sysyphus” – certainly not the kind of thing you would use to open a party!

- Aural Innovations #42 (May 2011)