Good news, rock fans and vocabulary builders! Biblioblog is proud to introduce a new feature, "Robert Christgau's Word of the Day." Not only is the self-proclaimed "Dean of American Rock Critics" witty and insightful, but his bite-sized record reviews are chock full of rich verbiage. Each entry in the series will give the dictionary definition of the word and the Consumer Guide review in which it is found. Kids, if you're studying for your SATs, stop by to boost your verbal score and improve your knowledge of rock history.

And the inaugural entry is...

per·i·stal·sis The wavelike muscular contractions of the alimentary canal or other tubular structures by which contents are forced onward toward the opening.

Fugs 4, Rounders Score [ESP-Disk', 1975]

Previously unreleased (Holy Modal) Rounders oldies (the original "Romping Through the Swamp") plus a mid-'60s best-of on the original rock-poets, with ample room for the musical genius of Tuli Kupferberg--including "Morning, Morning" in a version far lovelier than Spyder Turner's and the peristaltic "Caca Rocka," a/k/a "Pay Toilet Blues." The musicianship will offend the fastidious and loses even me at times. But there's a sense in which the halting drone of these sessions, vaguely reminiscent of the early Velvets, is more appropriate to the Fugs' secondhand rock than all the classy folkies they later patched on. B+

(www.robertchristgau.com)