It's loud as fuck. It's dumb as fuck. It's fun as fuck. It would be completely appropriate to end every sentence in this review with the word "fuck". We wouldn't do that to you, but it would be appropriate.

The Hospitals are the reason your mom told you to always wear earplugs to live shows. You might want a pair for listening at home, too. Their distorted, relentlessly noisy, gloriously nonsensical take on noise rock is over in less than 25 minutes, but it's good enough that you might well spend hours listening -- and frankly, that's dangerous. Thanks to Chris Woodhouse's blissfully mucky engineering, there really is no comfortable way to listen to The Hospitals -- either you can't tell what's going on or they're raping your ear canals and you still can't tell what's going on -- but at least the album has a presence.

Individual song descriptions seem almost pointless, as the whole mess inevitably blurs into one incomprehensible haze of Adam Stonehouse's brutal drumming, Ned Meiners's incomprehensible overpowered guitar and the group's echoing, garbled, shouted, gleefully non-melodic vocals assaulting you on every level of sound, but filling none of them. Distinguishing one track from the next is like telling the lesser Baldwin brothers apart -- the level of scrutiny required makes everyone uncomfortable and a little ashamed.

Still, for what it's worth, "Airplanes There" has a great beat that'll get your head bobbing even as it throbs horribly. There's even sort of a chorus going on, though you can pretty much scream whatever you want as the guys do their thing, for all that it matters. It devolves, of course; everything here does. "Boom Bap Biff", about as much of a standout as this kind of mess can have, mixes in some squealing guitars and shuffling beats for a sound that sets new standards for sheer derangement.

This is what elephants would sound like if they were robots made of amps and broken effects pedals and robotic monkeys were hitting them with hammers and they were walking in a pit full of easily crushed tin cans and somebody picked up a guitar and started just hitting it with a hammer as hard as he could. It's not for everyone, but it's exactly what The Hospitals were going for -- and if you're in the right mindset, it can be a hell of a lot of a fun.