By Will York

GREGG TURKINGTON AND Brandan Kearney are two of the smartest, friendliest, most self-deprecating guys you could hope to meet. So how is it these two San Francisco expatriates are also responsible for the recently published Warm Voices Rearranged: Anagram Record Reviews (Drag City Press) – without a doubt the most brutal, foulmouthed, heartlessly negative album-review guide published to date?

That's easy: they didn't write the reviews. They were merely conduits for a higher power, "divining" the deeper meanings held within album titles and associated phrases such as "Let's play the Alanis Morissette CD Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie!" So don't blame them when that phrase gets rearranged to read, "Theme? Obtuse infantile pseudo-spirituality from an anal slut. A jerk's poems!"

But isn't it cheating to add words like "Let's play the Alanis Morissette CD"? What about "Steve Winwood's stunning comeback album Arc of a Diver," which yielded the unpleasant "It swam to vulva, sank, drowned in cubic-acre bog of semen" – isn't that a little unfair?

Not so, Kearney says. "I'm more of a believer in necessity than chance," he explains. "So phrases like 'stunning comeback album' seem to be as inescapable as the titles of albums we used. Could we have used different phrases than we did? Evidently not, or we would have!"

This don't-shoot-the-messenger stance, which the authors eloquently explain in the book's preface, is delivered with a dryness that makes Steven Wright look like Carrot Top – especially when you consider the reviews' tendency to single out every musician who's ever had a drug problem, gotten fat, or just released a really lousy album.

For example, "Grateful Dead's Workingman's Dead" becomes " 'Weir' glum, fat, deranged, and sad, OK?" and "Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out" becomes "The truth? No good. Go find tune! An inane din. Yet it sells."

The thing is, despite the amount of havoc these two wrought on San Francisco's underground music scene and beyond throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Kearney and Turkington have never have been ones to assume much credit, or blame, for their efforts. Kearney appeared anonymously on numerous LPs by costumed folk-noise legends Caroliner in the late '80s and '90s, while Turkington is responsible for the prank-call CD Great Phone Calls, an obscene comedy classic reissued a couple of years ago by his friend Mike Patton's Ipecac Records. Without blowing too much of his cover, Turkington has also been a "close assistant" to depressive comedian Neil Hamburger over the years, and both he and Kearney have lent hands to the crippled suicide-pact survivors in the bumbling Coalinga death metal band Faxed Head.

More visibly, Turkington, who has since moved to Australia, headed up Amarillo Records, the bizarre home to artists ranging from Anton LaVey to local country rockers Dieselhed. Kearney, who has recently moved back to the Bay Area after several years on the East Coast, also ran a label, Nuf Sed, and both men published their own zines here in the city: Turkington the long-running Breakfast Without Meat and Kearney the smaller Nothing Doing, both of which, sadly, are currently impossible to find.

Warm Voices was just released this fall, but it's actually a product of Kearney and Turkington's heyday and the same dreary circumstances that have inspired much of these miscreants' other left-of-center efforts.

Turkington notes, "We started doing the reviews when we were working together at a San Francisco chemical company as a way to pass the time." The job, he explains, involved "everything from filling bottles of cyanide and/or hydrofluoric acid, to writing promotional literature, to getting on the phone and drumming up money from deadbeats."

But such drab conditions are the kind of thing that inspires these two. After all, without accounting for some degree of masochism, it would be hard to explain what could have driven them to pour so much effort into slaving over what winds up being a 70-page book (not counting the preface).

"For every [anagram] that's in the book, there were 10 more that were rejected as not being specific enough, or not funny enough, or too similar to other anagrams. It's amazing how often the word ego is found when you anagrammatize these rock album titles." No kidding: for example, Beach Boy "Mike Love's solo record Looking Back with Love" becomes "Overt hack milked B. Wilson. O vile rock ego!"

Indeed, one thing that becomes clear when trying to write a few of these anagram-reviews is that it's really difficult. Placing divinatory matters aside for a moment, Kearney was willing to reveal some of his working methods. "My trade secret is Scrabble tiles," he says. "Handled correctly, they are very reliable ... much more so than doing it on paper. I don't recommend computer programs.... [You] can customize the dictionaries and so forth, but if a computer spits out 25,000 sentences, it takes longer to weed out words you don't want than it does to do the goddamn anagram yourself."

Now that they've gotten their first book out, we can only cross our fingers for the leather-bound anthology of some of the authors' earlier zine writings. "We're in the 'discussion phase' for the anthology," Turkington says hopefully. "But it surely won't be leather-bound. All the key people involved with Breakfast Without Meat, myself, Lizzy Kate Gray, and [Meat Puppets drummer] Derrick Bostrom; and Nothing Doing, Brandan, are strict vegetarians and/or vegans ... no lie! Blame it all on veganism. It must be an iron deficiency that's to blame for our substandard products."