Lurking beneath the migraine-inducing yelps, the grimace-inducing attempts at comedy and the general noisy fracas that is Dead Nugget’s Dish’s new EP lies some encouraging creativity and one heck of a background singer, Faris Suqi.

Dead Nugget’s Dish call themselves "noise for the 1990s" (their website retains that line a year after the decade joined Nugget in the grave) and the moniker makes a certain degree of sense. The nuggets’ inspiration comes mostly from prior decades-- from 1980s metal and post-punk bands like Fugazi and from the 1970s funk groups—but the creative cacophony also includes reggae and other flavors of world music, making for a sort of eclectic postmodern punk product.

And it’s that sort of match and mixing that saves the EP from being the grating bore it might have otherwise been. Largely responsible for the redeeming ingenuity are the trio (!) of percussionists, Dave Baboorian, Luis Badell and Kite Mosam. In a welcome departure from the typically uninventive straightahead 4/4 drumming of the Nugget’s rock influences, the Nuggets meld a wide variety of rhythmic textures and add an arsenal of percussive instruments to the meat- and- potatoes drum kit. The percussive noodling makes stylistic room for the inclusion of the band’s latest new member, Suqi. With a terrific voice capable of authentic ethnic color, Suqi lends stylistic cred to the band’s global-political activist aspirations, demonstrated in the stridently individualist lyrics and the band’s fascination with the names of world political figures ("Che Che Guevarra dance," goes the chorus of one track…a previous album, "Boutros," was named for former UN boss Boutros Boutros Ghali). With a vocalist of his skill on board, the nuggets really ought to give Suqi a bigger role.

Especially since lead vocalist Mosam does not pretend to vocal skill—his yelps and bellows rarely attempt to follow any identifiable melodic line, and his eccentricity is the chief signal that the otherwise unfunny songs are meant to amuse. If there are big laugh lines in the lyrics, most get lost in the process of trying to make the delivery funny, as the words become largely unintelligible (although the EP title, "Drink some coffee, plan a revolution," is pretty amusing and makes for an engaging chant on the third track—easily the album’s funniest and most entertaining song). The nuggets would like, it would seem, to join the proud tradition of entertaining noisy nonsense bands like Happy Flowers, whose atonal screeching is more than justified by their sense of humor. But on this
EP, Dead Nugget’s Dish simply failed to amuse. The real fun lies not in guffaws but in the invigorating blend of styles.