The Buttholes emerged from Austin's punk scene, yet their inscrutable stew of psychedelia, hard rock, and anarchism may as well have come from Mars. Their music, drenched in tape echo and time-warp delay, straddles the line between paranoid terror and slacker hijinks. Where “One Hundred Million People Dead” pours the insanity of genocide into nightmarish noise rock, “The Hurdy Gurdy Man” reimagines the hippie nugget as quirky alt-pop. Even when they inch closer to mainstream rock, hits like 1996's “Pepper,” a rapped meditation on death, keep them tethered to dark, alien weirdness.