One of the questions I regularly ask the AI search engine is whether or not Les Claypool and/or Sean Lennon have mentioned anywhere that there will be another The Claypool Lennon Delirium record. The answer, paraphrased, is both are down, it just needs to happen. Claypool has been doing interviews because his Fearless Flying Frog Brigade project is doing their first tour in two decades now and in June, and Lennon is playing guitar in his band — Claypool calls him Shiner, which is both lovely and on-brand — so Monolith of Phobos, which was the pair’s first collaboration in June 2016, feels ripe for a revisit.

First of all, 2016, right? If you live in the States, it was a year defined by weird. Kind of astonishing that it was seven years ago, but I hear that years happen when you pile up enough days, so whatever. It felt like the entire year was the election, and certainly The Claypool Lennon Delirium weren’t in a vacuum in that regard, as they showed on “Ohmerica” with voice-of-reason satire in the second half of their debut. But it was a weird time to be alive, like I imagine was 1980, and maybe one of those moments where at least for some, it felt like the timeline split and they woke up someplace they thought they knew was one thing and turned out to be another, while perhaps for others the times were nothing but consistent. Multiple worlds in a world.

The Gen-X-ribbing-Millennials in the lyrics of “Boomerang Baby” is a bit gauche by the standards of the 2020s — please direct all grievances at the Boomers, who weren’t necessarily the ones to destroy the planet but certainly did little to help our species’ cause beyond liking a few decent bands — but that song still has that keyboard solo that, if it’s not a harpsichord, it’s close enough, and in both Claypool‘s bass and Lennon‘s vocals, it’s hypnotic, so maybe its first half and some of the other tracks here feel formative in comparison to 2019’s South of Reality (discussed here), which capped the ’10s with one of the decade’s best psychedelic rock records, the tradeoff for that is a closer look at the jammy roots of the project at its inception.

Starting off atmospheric with “The Monolith of Phobos,” the album moves into the two-parter “Cricket and the Genie (Movement I, The Delirium)” and “Cricket and the Genie (Movement II, Oratorio di Cricket),” which emphasize the could-go-anywhere style of Lennon‘s guitar playing, malleable in affect, tone and purpose, able to chug along with Claypool‘s trademark slap-bass on “Breath of a Salesman” or strum acoustic in a backing layer of “Captain Lariat” a song later, whatever a moment, a single part, calls for. Neither is overly long — “Captain Lariat” hits six minutes as the longest cut — but they give hints there and certainly elsewhere of the jams that would probably branch out live, ending, of course, with a sample of a chirping cricket as the song fades out underneath. Might be some frogs in there too, actually.

And the pair’s predilection for the bizarre, anticipating or at least being present in the oddness of the universe in which their work was arriving, and experimentalist heart shows up as well, maybe most of all on “There’s No Underwear in Space” — what George Lucas famously told a teenage Carrie Fisher when she asked for some on the set of Star Wars — with its creeping-but-not-creeping-like-“Mr. Wright” progression on guitar and various other sounds, vague blown-out speech at the end that might be Claypool, and so on. But that’s not the only showcase for it either, and it’s a context set by the wakeup noise of the intro to “The Monolith of Phobos” and throughout the “Cricket” duology as well in the vocal arrangement at the end of the second part, but it neither was nor should be a surprise that some of the material would be so identifiably Claypool‘s own since his is one of the most identifiable sounds rock of any stripe has ever produced in the 70-plus years it has existed.

Storytelling is always an essential component. As “Mr. Wright” plays out, the title character’s perverse transgressions escalate. “Cricket” has a plot. “Captain Lariat.” But Lennon takes lead vocals on “Bubbles Burst” and “Ohmerica,” with its acoustic and fuzz and keys, so the line of who wrote what and where isn’t necessarily stark, and The Claypool Lennon Delirium, as a band, are more dynamic for that. The pairing of “Ohmerica” and “Oxycontin Girl,” introduced with standalone bass and moving into a tale of addiction that feels like an update of Primus‘ “Harold on the Rocks” while going elsewhere in sound with splashes of fuzz buried in the mix, filling out the space behind the central bassline before and after the solo opens up in the middle in such a way as to feel like they were recorded in the same overdub, the same stem, whether or not they actually were.

In any case, the point stands that Monolith of Phobos has that level of attention to detail that you can get lost in if you choose, but there’s an overarching ride happening here, and the advantage of having two collaborators who are both master players, master songwriters and master performers, is that provided the egos don’t clash — and by all accounts everybody gets along well enough that Claypool and Lennon are touring together again — you’re probably going to get a work that on some level represents that mastery. Whether it’s the maddening catchiness of “Mr. Wright,” the entrancing repetitions in “Cricket and the Genie (Movement II, Oratorio di Cricket),” or the melancholy, rainy-day psychedelic flourish of “Bubbles Burst,” The Claypool Lennon Delirium remain on solid ground rhythmically and structurally regardless of how either of those things are being used at a given time.

Accordingly, and with true nerdly diligence, I will probably keep asking that robot when and if a third album might show up. Not this week, I suppose, but Claypool cycling through projects between Primus, Frog Brigade, offshoots like Duo de Twang and this and various others, plus the ever-present possibility of a new band or thing, whatever it might be, is nothing new, and hopefully the next The Claypool Lennon Delirium arrives before the machine grows intelligent enough to tell me to talk about something else.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

It was Tuesday and The Patient Mrs.’ mother had just arrived, down for an overnight from Connecticut. This week was the week in New Jersey, weather-wise. I doubt very much we’ll see its equal this year. Yesterday had a little chill, and by Tuesday afternoon the air had gotten a little hot, but taking the average between those two is where it was for most of the week and the blue sky felt like a lifeline. So when The Patient Mrs.’ mom showed up about an hour before the bus was due to come get The Pecan, I canceled school and we all went for a nice long walk in the arboretum in Morristown. I regret nothing about getting that idea or following the impulse. It was a great day.

Yesterday, The Patient Mrs. and I went to the school where The Pecan will attend kindergarten next year. We’re steamrolling toward an ADHD diagnosis probably next year for kiddo, so there have been all kinds of meetings and tests to see where/what/when the needs are and how they can best be met as real-school begins after pre-K. The resounding impression was that The Pecan is really, really, really intelligent, needs help with things like sharing and not being in charge, and will have a shared para in class next year, which is very much what we wanted. We talked a bit about gender as well, since as I’ve said here, I’m pretty sure kindergarten will be happening as a girl and until and unless we hear otherwise from The Pecan we’re proceeding from this assumption, but that will also get its own meeting. Logistics to work out, etc.

But the kid’s smart, no doubt about it. Like his mother. That has ups and downs, frankly, as smart people are more likely to be miserable and I might honestly trade a little intelligence for some happiness as regards disposition, but along with the intense guilt I feel for being a bad parent every single day — because, rest assured, I am one every single day; consistent, constant failure — I am pretty regularly astounded by some of the shit the kid comes up with, and she is at a super-fun age for stories, reading and starting to want to write her own. Maybe it’s not such a surprise I’d be into that.

There’s a bunch of stuff slated for next week, and at some point I’m going to post the podcast The Patient Mrs. and I made, but the kid’s up and we’re watching ‘The Cat in the Hat’ and it’s time for me to go swim, so I’m going to leave it there. Have a great and safe weekend. Don’t forget to hydrate, watch your head — I totally cried in that meeting recounting The Pecan’s March 2021 skull-cracking, by the way, so I really mean watch your head this week — and I’ll be back on Monday with a whole bunch of stuff I’m already behind on, which is how it goes. Thanks for reading.

FRM.

The Obelisk Collective on Facebook

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch

The Claypool Lennon Delirium, South of Reality (2019)

As the second album from the headliner collaboration of Sean Ono Lennon and Les Claypool begins, after some yes-this-is-gonna-be-weird backward voices, there’s a sweet-toned guitar shimmer that lends a peaceful vibe to the unfolding opener “Little Fishes.” That serenity is subversive. The song continues a thread of real-world cynicism that was laid out on their 2016 debut, Monolith of Phobos, and which this more realized sophomore effort updates with references to mercury leaking into the water supply, the Pilsbury dough boy, trans issues and Obi-Wan Kenobi — the latter of whose mention is followed by the signature swish-swish of a lightsaber, which is already not the first of the many creative arrangement elements put to use on the nine-track/47-minute outing. Ono Lennon and Claypool worked exceptionally well together the first time out, and South of Reality finds them all the more driven, not just in social commentary — though the record does seem to touch in with the ground regularly; it opens with “Little Fishes,” makes a centerpiece of “Easily Charmed by Fools” and closes with “Like Fleas” — but in storytelling as well. Second track and album highlight “Blood and Rockets: Movement I, Saga of Jack Parsons / Movement II, Too the Moon” recounts the saga of rocket scientist and Aleister Crowley follower Jack Parsons and his time spent bridging the gap between outer space and the outer limits of ritualism, orgies and the like. The later “Toady Man’s Hour” almost certainly has its basis in real-world subject matter, though it leaves to interpretation who the toady man in question is, but “Blood and Rockets,” “Amethyst Realm,” and even “Boriska,” though it’s also named after a single person and tells their narrative in linear fashion, pull back from a direct social commentary and highlight the fact that there are multiple songwriters at work.

Those songwriters just happen to be Les Claypool and Sean Ono Lennon.

The latter, as the son of Yoko Ono and John Lennon, finds an outlet in The Claypool Lennon Delirium for experimentalism and melodic songcraft alike. There are, almost inevitably, a cache of Beatlesian moments, as though this project — as opposed to his work in The Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger, Cibo Matto, Action Figure Party, etc. — is a place where those various sides can be reconciled. And for his part, Claypool is right in there. The Primus frontman and iconic jammer not only seems to drive a good portion of the songwriting on “South of Reality (Path of Totality),” “Little Fishes,” “Toady Man’s Hour,” “Easily Charmed by Fools,” and “Like Fleas,” but he brings vocal harmonies and a trademark bounce to Ono Lennon‘s material that only furthers the spirit of collaboration between the two. And more, that line of “whose song is this?” is blurrier on South of Reality than it was on Monolith of Phobos, and as the two mix instrumentation — Paulo Baldi plays drums and Adam Gates adds “voices,” but beyond that, guitar, bass, keys, vocals, and so on are all Claypool (who also engineered and mixed) and Ono Lennon (who also produced) — they seem all the more at home in this manner of working. There’s still a resonant sense of variety in the material, and definitely two personalities at play, but the mutual affection for classic progressive rock and psychedelia they showed in covering King Crimson, Flower Travellin’ Band, The Who and Pink Floyd on 2017’s Lime and Limpid Green EP serves them well in these songs and is a uniting factor. In their more lush moments, as on “Blood and Rockets” or “Amethyst Realm” or the penultimate “Cricket Chronicles Revisited: Pt. 1, Ask Your Doctor/Pt. 2, Psyde Effects,” with its rampant percussion and vocal tradeoffs, they not only pay tribute to this lineage, but add to it with a tonal presence and open creative spirit. This is not without some level of self-indulgence, but prog never was.

And for as far as they range, either on “Cricket Chronicles Revisited” — indeed, it’s a sequel to the two-part “Cricket and the Genie” from Monolith of Phobos — or in “Amethyst Realm,” which is the longest cut at 7:47, they always seem to find themselves out in that psychedelic fray. Having a Les Claypool bassline to work around certainly never hurts in that regard, though Baldi might be unsung hero of South of Reality as well, as the drums are not only malleable to the angular push and bounce of the title-track but able as well to keep up with the percussion in “Cricket Chronicles Revisited” and the languid unfolding of verses and chorus in “Amethyst Realm.” Both of those jam well into the dimensional planes of the far-out, where “Blood and Rockets” holds its form a bit more in the wash of gorgeous vocal melody of its second movement, but they’re never lacking direction either, and that helps tie them to some of the shorter songs, like “Toady Man’s Hour” or “Like Fleas,” which caps South of Reality with probably the “realest” bit of perspective of all via an image of the living planet conjuring earthquakes to shake humanity from its surface, “Like fleas on the back of a dog.” At least it would be well earned, and if anything was left standing, we’d probably leave some nice ruins for the sentient dolphins or space archaeologists to check out later.

A record of this profile — name brand, to say the least — playing to such influences doesn’t happen often. The Claypool Lennon Delirium make toys of the outwardly bizarre and seem to have a good time playing with those toys, which, honestly, is probably how a second record happened in the first place. And like the compass-bearing cockroach looking out over a desolate, alien landscape (plus a nifty use of Star Trek‘s font!) on its cover, South of Reality paints its own world and teaches listeners the rules of that world as it goes, which have grown all the more expansive as the last couple years have played out and this collaboration has progressed. We may all be doomed in the end, but it’s fun ride getting there.

As always, I hope you enjoy.

—

So, because I’m Mr. Goestoshows now, I’m hitting up the Middle East Upstairs tonight for Test Meat, Forming the Void, Kings Destroy and Gozu. And then tomorrow, I think I’m traveling with Gozu to New York to see the same show but with Clamfight opening instead of Test Meat. Gonna be good. Both nights. After I posted a thing whining about daydreaming about it on social media, I was invited to go guest vocals with Clamfight for the track “Echoes in Stone” from their last album. I don’t know if I’m going to yet or not, but it might be fun. We’ll see.

But look for those reviews early next week. I’ve also got slated a Mount Atlas EP stream for Monday, which I have no idea how I’ll put together other than to say I will because I said I would. That’ll be that.

It was busy week. Not as much onslaught as last week in terms of posts, which was purposeful on my part — I think I had seven posts one day this week, maybe? — as I can handle a six-post day if I feel like I need to, but anything more than that gets incrementally more consuming of my general well-being and I start to lose perspective. That little Gollum voice in my head steps in to remind me, “Nobody gives a crap,” which actually kind of turns out to be helpful in its way, since it means I can write that news story tomorrow and it won’t matter. I forget that sometimes. Then Gollum goes, “You don’t have any friends! Nobody likes you!” and I shame-eat more peanut butter.

At least it’s good. The baby likes it too, so we share.

This weekend is a new episode of The Obelisk Show on Gimme Radio. Sunday, 7PM Eastern. Listen at: http://gimmeradio.com.

Please tune in. I’m having fun doing that and I don’t want to get canceled because nobody listens. I don’t have any numbers to indicate that’s the case either way, but you know, I’m kind of a weirdo on that station, and way less metal generally than a lot of what they play, so yeah.

I’ll also have a wrap of the show on Monday. You know what? I wasn’t gonna, but let’s just do notes:

MON: Live review; Gimme wrap; Mount Atlas EP stream.
TUE: Live review.
WED: Cowboys & Aliens review/full album stream.
THU: No Man’s Valley video premiere/album review.
FRI: Weeed review.

There. Now it’s all out there and I can stop talking about it piecemeal. I’m a little concerned about how it’ll all get done, but screw it, I always am.

Got up a bit before 3:30 this morning. It’s been mostly 4:15AM the last couple weeks, but The Patient Mrs. was up and I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I just decided to stay awake. I’ll nap this morning or this afternoon — or both! — when the baby naps and thereby not die driving home from the show tonight. Good times. It’s about quarter to six now, so I expect the baby up momentarily. He almost never makes it past 6AM. If I’m still alive when he’s a teenager and sleeps late, I’ll do my best to remember these days of early alarms and writing in the kitchen before the sun comes up. Yesterday it was snowing overnight. That wasn’t so bad. I turned on the outside light and watched the snow fall as I wrote the Hexvessel review that went up a bit ago. Not my best review, but the circumstances were nice.

Post is already too long, so I’ll leave it there. Please have a great and safe weekend. If you’re out in Boston or Brooklyn at either of those shows, I’ll see you there, and otherwise, please check out the forum, radio stream, and merch at Dropout. Thanks for reading.

Ah, baby’s up. Like clockwork, this Pecan.

The Obelisk Forum

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk shirts & hoodies