Skullflower’s Ponyland arrives wearing the wrong face. The cover belongs visually to the cheerful American universe of teenage comic strips: rounded lettering, bright colors, clean black outlines and a smiling blonde whose exaggerated innocence has already crossed into adult parody. The artwork is credited to Larry Welz, creator of Cherry Poptart, the erotic underground comic later known simply as Cherry. Welz built Cherry from the visual vocabulary associated with Archie comics, retaining the wholesome suburban surfaces while replacing their endless romantic hesitation with explicit sexual appetite. On the front of a Skullflower record, that polished cartoon invitation becomes another form of distortion.
Released by Sympathy for the Record Industry in 1994, Ponyland contains two unusually substantial tracks for a seven-inch. The title piece occupies more than seven minutes, while “Fake Revolt” runs slightly over five. The record turns at 33⅓ RPM, allowing nearly thirteen minutes of Skullflower’s scorched psychedelic noise to be compressed onto a format more commonly associated with quick punk singles. The result feels physically small but musically overgrown.
By 1994, Skullflower had already moved beyond the blunt noise-rock assault of Form Destroyer and IIIrd Gatekeeper. Matthew Bower and the changing group around him still used guitar, bass and drums, but the instruments were losing their conventional boundaries. Riffs no longer needed to lead songs from one section to another. They could be repeated until they dissolved into vibration. Feedback was not a layer placed over the performance. It was the atmosphere in which the performance occurred.
“Ponyland” begins with a heavy, circling guitar figure whose repetition immediately establishes weight without providing a stable center. The riff seems to drag itself forward through layers of amplifier haze. Stuart Dennison’s drumming gives the piece a loose, battered momentum, but the rhythm never settles into the dependable drive of ordinary heavy rock. Each strike feels partially absorbed by the surrounding distortion.
The guitar sound is enormous without becoming cleanly monumental. It splinters at the edges, producing smaller tones that hover around the central movement. These secondary sounds are part of Skullflower’s peculiar richness. Beneath the obvious roar, phantom melodies and stray harmonics appear for a few seconds, then disappear back into the mass. What initially sounds like a single overloaded surface gradually reveals multiple layers moving at different speeds.
The title creates its own contradiction. Ponyland suggests a child’s imaginary kingdom of bright animals, gentle landscapes and harmless fantasy. Skullflower supplies a territory of trudging rhythm, electrical fog and guitar tones that seem to have been left outside in corrosive weather. Yet the music is not entirely opposed to the title. Beneath its damaged surface lies a strange, narcotic beauty. The repeated figure has the simplicity of a children’s melody enlarged until it becomes threatening.
That tension is intensified by Welz’s cover. Cherry was an adult offshoot of Archie’s visual world, designed around the collision between innocent cartoon grammar and explicit desire. Before internet pornography made sexual imagery instantly abundant, an underground comic could carry an unusual charge simply because it appeared where it was not supposed to. A drawing in a comic shop or record sleeve could become a sudden physical event. The image was fixed, scarce and attached to an object that had to be found, purchased and hidden or displayed.
Time changes that charge. Images once capable of producing immediate excitement may later become historical markers, reminders of an earlier body and an earlier visual culture. The contemporary abundance of animated and illustrated pornography can make attraction to drawings seem either entirely normal or strangely incomprehensible, depending on the viewer. Welz’s artwork quietly connects those periods. Cherry demonstrates that erotic attachment to cartoon bodies did not begin with online anime culture. It belonged to underground print long before digital access made the phenomenon enormous and visible.
Skullflower’s music performs a related corruption of familiar form. Just as Cherry takes the smiling language of mainstream teen comics and pushes it into adult territory, Skullflower takes rock instrumentation and subjects it to excess until its expected meanings become unstable. Guitar, bass and drums remain recognizable, but they no longer promise songs, solos or release. The familiar body is present while behaving incorrectly.
“Ponyland” develops through accumulation rather than conventional progression. Small changes in pressure become major events. A guitar tone rises slightly above the central churn. The drums briefly become more forceful. A new layer of feedback enters and changes the apparent shape of the room. The track never announces these alterations as separate sections, but its internal landscape is constantly moving.
The effect is psychedelic without the decorative signals usually associated with psychedelic rock. There are no sparkling studio effects, elaborate solos or colorful changes of mood. Skullflower reaches altered consciousness through repetition and density. The riff remains in place long enough for perception to begin changing around it. What sounded blunt during the opening minute becomes oddly detailed by the fifth.
“Fake Revolt” is shorter and more agitated. Its title suggests rebellion reduced to pose, an imitation of disruption that leaves the underlying order untouched. Skullflower’s performance offers no clean heroic resistance. The guitars grind and flare while the rhythm lurches beneath them, producing music too damaged to function as an anthem.
The track has a harsher, more compressed shape than “Ponyland.” Instead of opening into a broad drone, it presses its elements together. Guitar frequencies scrape across one another, and the percussion appears to struggle for space. The sound resembles a band still playing after the architecture around it has begun collapsing.
The two pieces make an effective seven-inch because they present different balances within the same method. “Ponyland” stretches repetition toward hallucination. “Fake Revolt” tightens the sound into abrasion. One side feels like a landscape gradually becoming toxic; the other resembles the argument that takes place after everyone realizes the landscape cannot be repaired.
Sympathy for the Record Industry was an appropriate label for this object. Its catalog mixed garage rock, punk, damaged pop and records that treated rock-and-roll history as material for affectionate sabotage. Ponyland sits oddly but comfortably within that world. Skullflower was far more abstract and severe than much of the label’s output, yet the record still carries the physical vocabulary of an underground rock single: a seven-inch disc, lurid artwork and two tracks divided by the necessary act of turning the object over.
The front illustration was colored by Evan Mack, preserving the bright commercial finish of Welz’s line work. That brightness matters. A darker or more obviously grotesque image would merely confirm the music’s hostility. The cheerful erotic cartoon makes the record more unstable because it refuses to explain the sound correctly. It promises amusement, fantasy and immediate pleasure. The music supplies duration, friction and pleasure distorted almost beyond recognition.
This mismatch is not accidental decoration. Skullflower’s releases frequently place occult, grotesque, abstract or culturally displaced images beside music that remains impossible to summarize visually. Ponyland is especially effective because the cover activates associations that change with the viewer’s age and history. It may appear funny, arousing, embarrassing, nostalgic or merely strange. The music does something similar, shifting between heaviness, boredom, trance, irritation and beauty according to how long and how closely it is heard.
Ponyland belongs to the fertile middle of Skullflower’s original run, when the group still sounded like a physical band but was rapidly dissolving into the drone and freeform noise that would dominate later work. The record’s two tracks preserve that unstable balance. Drums and riffs remain, yet neither can control the widening field of feedback.
The seven-inch looks like an adult cartoon novelty and sounds like rock music forgetting how to behave. Larry Welz transforms the visual innocence of Archie into erotic parody. Skullflower transforms the recognizable body of rock into a slow electrical fever. Ponyland places those two distortions together and allows neither to explain the other.
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