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Friday Full-Length: Fatso Jetson, Toasted

Posted in Bootleg Theater on January 25th, 2019 by JJ Koczan

If Nietzsche went beyond good and evil, then surely Fatso Jetson exist beyond weird and normal. They’re often credited as one of the principal founding acts of desert rock, and fair enough, but they’ve also always held a spot on a wavelength of their own, no less comfortable in strains of bizarre prog, manic surf-jazz or punk than in floor-of-hot-coals boogie. Their third album, Toasted, was recorded in 1998 for release through Bong Load Custom Records and was their first outing not to be issued by SST, whose founder Greg Ginn (also Black Flag), as legend has it, signed them on the strength of their first show for their 1995 debut, Stinky Little Gods and its 1997 follow-up, Power of Three. The latter title sums up an essential component of Fatso Jetson‘s strength, as it’s the power of the players involved in the band that’s always made them so head-spinningly good. Others have come and gone over time including family and friends, but the core trio of guitarist/vocalist Mario Lalli (also Yawning Man), bassist Larry Lalli and drummer Tony Tornay (now also of All Souls) has remained at the foundation of Fatso Jetson for the last quarter-century, and they remain an act unto themselves in style and substance alike.

Plenty of bands talk about being open in terms of creativity. Anything goes. Far fewer actually bring that to life in their output, but listening to Fatso Jetson immediately separate wheat from chaff in their listenership as Toasted opener “New Age Android” turns to biting freakout robot sounds on (I think) guitar, or the subsequent swinger “Magma” and the maddening multi-layered solo that would round out if they weren’t actually in control enough to turn back to the chorus at the end, the band make it plain right away that their scope isn’t one to be limited. Not that they’re inconsistent — Toasted, which was produced by the band with Chris Goss of Masters of Reality, flows easily from one song to the next — but that there’s a naturalistic component to what they do and the instrumental chemistry so much on display between the Lalli cousins and Tornay is a key uniting factor in their craft. Through the weighted garage thrust of “I’ve Got the Shame” and into the instrumental “She’s So Borg” that seems to complement “New Age Android” — the lyrics of which could be argued as prescient of the rise of mobile social media culture; self-as-product and all that — Fatso Jetson go where they want to go and have the means to get there, but even the fact that “She’s So Borg” is in conversation with the opener, without actually including words, while hinting toward it in the titles demonstrates just how conscious the band were at the time of what they were doing. Fatso Jetson always had a master plan, it was just on a wavelength all its own.

fatso jetson toastedAt their most frenetic, they are blindingly intense, and even when they lock into a groove as on “Swollen Offering,” they have the ability to utterly blindside their audience with changes. Toasted skronks out with some spoken word in the second half of “Swollen Offering” and pushes into full-on what-the-fuckery before the instrumental “Tutta Dorma” presents a bit of chill, which of course is a setup for “Rail Job” to sprint through its sub-two-minutes with maximum drive, leading to the mid-paced semi-stomp-into-psychedelia of “Procrastination Process” and the return to fits and starts of the instrumental finale “Too Many Skulls.” It’s a side B dense enough to be an entire full-length for most bands, but Fatso Jetson emerge, sweaty perhaps, but otherwise unscathed, and seem to look around after “Too Many Skulls” crashes into its finish and ask, “Okay, so what’ve you got for that?”

That’s pretty much the challenge Fatso Jetson are putting out there, especially in their earlier work — the first three records. Here’s who we are, what’ve you got for it? Though they did plenty of them along the way — including, in this era, with Fu Manchu, The Bloodshot and Fireball Ministry — they do not sound like a band with whom one would want to release a split, because contrary to the narrative of the laid back ideal of desert rock, Fatso Jetson are right in your face, and Toasted has a confrontational aspect to the music that’s unmistakable in its intent. Think of jazz soloists trying to outdo one another, and that might be Fatso Jetson on a bill with whoever. And as amorphous as it is, their style has always been recognizable, and no matter where they’ve taken it, they’ve done so with that core chemistry and no shortage of rough-hewn class that, even in their most willfully abrasive moments, serves as another crucial uniting factor. Plus, man, fuckin’ Tony Tornay on drums? God damn.

After recording Toasted, Fatso Jetson released Flames for All on Man’s Ruin Records in 1999 and Cruel and Delicious on Rekords Rekords (an imprint belonging to Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age) in 2001. They’d put out Live in 2007, but it wasn’t until 2010’s Archaic Volumes (review here) that they had another studio album, and though splits followed with Yawning ManHerba Mate (review here) and Farflung (review here), and Toasted saw reissue in 2012, their next full-length was 2016’s Idle Hands (review here) on Heavy Psych Sounds. They’ve grown to meld psychedelic impulses and astro-jazz into their whatever-the-hell-they-want-to-do maturity of craft, and the last album found them bringing in Dino von Lalli (son to Mario; also of BigPig) on guitar to round out a four-piece lineup. As Mario Lalli splits time with Yawning Man and Tornay hit the road last year with All SoulsFatso Jetson have been playing here and there but largely quiet since a late-2016 split with del-Toros (discussed here) in terms of studio work. I wouldn’t call them dormant, since they’ve toured regularly, but there’s been little word of new material kicked around and it may be a few years yet before they get another record together. Or it might be next month. 25 years later, who dare to predict Fatso Jetson?

Thanks for reading, and as always, I hope you enjoy.

I have some cool stuff coming up next week — track premieres for Green Lung and Straytones and a video from Doctor Sax — but there’s other stuff I can’t talk about yet too, so you’ll hopefully indulge me if I don’t do proper notes this week. Keeping secrets, I guess. Not that anyone’s waiting with bated breath to know what I’ll be writing about, but please take my word for it when I say it’s going to be fun. I’m looking forward to it.

On Monday morning, The Patient Mrs., The Pecan and I hightailed it out of New Jersey. There was supposed to be a snowstorm that would’ve maybe kept us there an extra day — I wouldn’t have complained — but it dusted, and then was cold, and that was it. Don’t get me wrong, it was pain-in-the-ass cold, but it’s January and you have to live with that possibility. I loaded the car and off we went early in the morning, The Patient Mrs. doing the first shift of driving so I could finish putting together the news posts for the day, because that’s how I do.

She went back to work this week, did The Patient Mrs., for the start of classes for the Spring semester. She’s got tenure coming through this term, which is just the latest of many examples of her next-level utter goddamn brilliance, but it’s academia, so there are all kinds of hoops she’s had to jump through and it’s like a months-long wait for it to actually happen. These people wear robes and do everything slow as hell. It’s like if Sunn O))) could grant degrees.

The Fightin’ Dronies.

That’s what that university’s team would be called.

Anyway.

So we’re back in Massachusetts. I won’t lie, it was nice to come back and get the last four weeks’ worth of mail, but beyond that I’m hardly stoked at the return to New England. Seeing that Pecan get to know my family more and start to interact more with them and just have more space to run around and climb on stuff — which he does constantly; we have to overturn the chairs in the kitchen or he’ll be up on the table; he’s 15 months old today — was a joy. We’ll be back down there for spring break (woo!) in March and then again for at least most of the summer, but yeah. Kind of isolated up here.

At the same time, while I haven’t been looking forward to The Patient Mrs. going back to work, because, you know, I love her and enjoy spending time with her and all that, I have been excited to have more one-on-one time with the baby. He’s a monumental pain in the ass, like, wow, but fun. We read books together and go places and I get him out of the house and he gets me out of the house and some parts are challenging and some parts are a good time and some parts are boring and some parts are heart-racing — did I mention he’s a climber? — but I can’t ignore the fact of how lucky I am to be able to stay home with him, and I feel very much like what I’m doing now in terms of writing as much as I can and balancing that with daddy-time is the kind of work I was meant to be doing all along. He’s a madman, and there are definitely times where I just need to check out for a coupe minutes and get my head back, but that’s all part of the thing. Plus I get to make jokes — mostly to myself — about “dad rock,” and that’s fun too.

Well, it’s about quarter after five, and I expect he’ll be awake before six, so I’m going to punch out and get the day’s first post live before he’s up. I hope you have a great and safe weekend, and thanks again for reading. Really, stay tuned for next week. It’s going to be special.

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Friday Full-Length: Fu Manchu, Daredevil

Posted in Bootleg Theater on September 28th, 2018 by JJ Koczan

Fu Manchu, Daredevil (1995)

What’s most incredible about listening to the earliest Fu Manchu albums, whether that’s 1995’s Daredevil or their preceding 1994 debut, No One Rides for Free (reissue review here), is just how vividly the band knew even at that point what they wanted to do. Granted, guitarist/vocalist Scott Hill, bassist Mark Abshire and drummer Ruben Romano had worked together in the prior outfit, Virulence, whose work Southern Lord reissued in 2010 as the collection, If this isn’t a Dream… 1985-1989 (review here), but even so, for all of Fu Manchu‘s reputation as a bunch of aloof, laid back surfer dudes who, I don’t know, just happened to plug in their guitars and help define fuzz rock?, the coherence and the consciousness at work in No One Rides for Free and Daredevil, the sheer songcraft in cuts like “Trapeze Freak,” “Gathering Speed,” “Sleestak,” “Egor” and “Push Button Magic,” the structure of the album — CD era linearity, to be sure, but still vinyl-ready at 11 tracks/43 minutes, and indeed reissued by the band on LP in 2015 via their At the Dojo imprint; it’s up on their Bandcamp page — and the performances themselves leave no doubt that Fu Manchu were aware of the sound they were seeking out. The groove that would so much come to fruition on subsequent outings like 1996’s In Search Of… (discussed here) and 1997’s The Action is Go (discussed here), the Eatin’ Dust 10″ in ’99 and 2000’s King of the Road, was already embedded in their sound, and in its toneand overarching flow, Daredevil shows that without question. It emits that SoCal sense of cool born of skate and surf culture that still resonates nearly a quarter-century later, and not just because kids are walking around in flannels and boots again (hilarious though that is), but because it taps into the timeless notion of American self-determinism; the will and ability to look at what the masses are doing and say, “nah, not for me.” As long as there’s been cool, that’s been it, and listening back to Daredevil now, thinking of it in its world-just-getting-over-grunge-and-wondering-what’s-next context, Fu Manchu were doing precisely that.

As the band continued to evolve into the immediately-identifiable processes it continues to carry out to this day — their latest album, Clone of the Universe (review here), is a winner — so too did the lineup change. Daredevil marked the departure of Abshire from the four-piece with HillRomano and lead guitarist Eddie Glass, and the arrival of bassist Brad Davis, who remains in the lineup. One might then think of it as a bridge between the debut and In Search Of… to come, but that does something of a disservice to the chorus of “Coyote Duster,” the fu manchu daredevilstart-stop riff and Glass‘ solo there, or the shimmy in second cut “Tilt,” which backs “Trapeze Freak” at the outset and, like that track, tosses the name of the record into the lyrics. Certainly at the time Daredevil came out, no one knew Fu Manchu would be back the next year with a genre landmark, and while Daredevil still has its formative elements in terms of their approach, to listen to the semi-spaced push of “Travel Agent” and its ultra-stoned nodder compatriot “Sleestak” and its consciousness-drifting answer in “Space Farm,” the roots of what they’d become are right there in the depth of distortion, the weight of their rhythm and their seemingly endless supply of hooks. “Lug” has some elements of the Southern Cali punk scene that birthed them, and “Egor” and “Wurkin'” back-to-back are solid mid-paced groovers that are no less memorable than anything before them while retaining their edge as more than just exercises in songwriting. Top it off with “Push Button Magic” as a late highlight, and Daredevil winds up as a completely underrated inclusion in the Fu Manchu catalog. It may be the that the Hill/Glass/Davis/Romano lineup were getting their feet under them in these songs, but there’s no question they absolutely did so at some point before they hit the studio to record. Seriously, who’s gonna fight with Glass‘ watery solo in “Space Farm?” Jerks, that’s who.

There’s no denying — and I mean none — what Fu Manchu would go on to create, and I’m not taking anything away from those records. And as Glass and Romano departed in order to re-team with Abshire in Nebula, and a fresh-off-Kyuss Brant Bjork took over on drums and Bob Balch came in on lead guitar, Fu Manchu‘s delivery only continued to smooth itself out to a point of unmatched fuzzy refinement. One could argue that 2001’s California Crossing and 2004’s Start the Machine (the latter their lone release on DRT Records, which at that point was also handling Clutch) took them too far into a commercial direction, but that’s mostly a quibble with production value, since Fu Manchu have always been and remain an immediately accessible listen. Even unto their Century Media years with 2007’s We Must Obey (discussed here) and 2009’s Signs of Infinite Power (discussed here), which beefed up their fuzz considerably, they never had anything approaching pretense in their sound, and their latter-day work on 2014’s Gigantoid (review here) and the aforementioned Clone of the Universe, has found them reopening the conversation with their punk and hardcore roots with a rawer take while retaining an affinity for the heavier elements they helped make so essential in the first place. Classic band? Definitely.

And most importantly, the value of Daredevil extends beyond the academic to the songs themselves. 23 years after the fact, it’s still a gnarly listen, brimming with attitude and a quality of output that, yes, demonstrates clearly that Fu Manchu‘s vision of fuzzy heavy rock was not happenstance, but moreover, simply kicks ass. To my knowledge, they’ve never played it in its entirety live as they have The Action is GoIn Search Of… and (I believe) King of the Road, and I’m not sure they would, as it doesn’t have the same kind of profile as those records, but if any of these tracks made its way into a set, as “Push Button Magic” still does every now and then, I can only imagine feeling lucky to be there to see it.

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

If you’re reading this, that at least means I made it to the end of the week enough to get it posted, so you’ll pardon me if I take a second to congratulate myself on that.

Before I get into anything else, I want to say thanks to everybody who listened to the first episode of The Obelisk Show on Gimme Radio. Can’t even begin to tell you how much that means to me. If you get the chance, it’s re-airing two more times over the next couple days:

Saturday, Sept 29 at 11am ET / 8am PT
Monday, October 1 at 11am ET / 8am PT

If you get to check it out, it’s hugely appreciated.

I’ve already turned in a playlist for a second episode — yes, it starts with YOB — but have to learn how to use their voice-recording dealy before it actually gets to air. We’ll see how it goes. Either way, my plan is to bring on The Patient Mrs. for a guest spot following up on the first episode’s cameo.

And next week I’m also traveling to Norway for the Høstsabbat festival, so I might try to chase down dudes in Asteroid or Elephant Tree, etc., and see if they want to record a couple minutes to air at a later time. That would probably be episode three. Look at me, thinking ahead.

I leave for that on Thursday, get into Oslo on Friday. Fest starts Friday evening, runs through Saturday, starting in the afternoon, and then I fly back on Sunday. Quick, efficient, in and out. My flights have a layover in Copenhagen, but nothing long enough to actually leave the airport. Still, I’ve never been to Denmark. Now at least I can say I was in and out. That’s more than I’ve ever been able to do with Sweden, much to my ongoing shame.

But I’m looking forward to Høstsabbat and incredibly grateful for the chance to get back there. It’s going to be good.

The Patient Mrs., The Pecan and I were in Connecticut last weekend, and it was good to get out of the house for a couple days and kind of reset the brain after having to put The Much-Missed Little Dog Dio down. At least not be somewhere where everything reminds me of her, which seems to be the case at home. It’s been rough. I know loss is universal, and everyone goes through it, and it always sucks, but some you feel more than you feel others. This one I’ll have with me for as long as I have anything.

What part of the week I didn’t spend writing or falling asleep against my will, I mostly spent taking care of the baby. Last semester, The Patient Mrs.’ schedule allowed her to come home between classes, feed him before she went back, and at least give me a couple minutes to get a post up or do something crazy like shower or go to the bathroom. The shifts (that is, mine) are longer now and her commitments outside of teaching classes are manifold. Lot of meetings, lot of favors done for colleagues. The Pecan is 11 months old as of earlier this week. He’s walking and babbling, climbing the furniture and getting into absolutely everything, but he’s also a lot, a lot, a lot of fun right now.

He’s had stretches where it’s been hard to take — those early teething stretches were not great — but (fingers always crossed) he’s sleeping through the night, which I know because I’m up for most of it and have the baby monitor on while I write, and he wants to play and read books and mash up blueberries and laugh and have a good time. Sure, we spent all day yesterday watching the Kavanaugh hearing, and that was probably the most screen-time he’s ever had, but even so, it’s a blast to chase him around the room, pick him up, give him his stuffed Porg to play with and so on. A lot of fun. Feels good. Money is super-tight — as in, The Patient Mrs. got paid last Friday and we were broke by the time I finished grocery shopping and buying gas this past Tuesday — but “daddy” is the best job I’ve ever had, hands down.

Emotions.

I’ve got a lot of stuff in the works for next week, including at some point a Wasted Theory video premiere that needs to get placed, but here’s where the notes are at right now ahead of the Norway trip:

Mon.: Megaton Leviathan interview and track premiere.
Tue.: The Exploding Eyes Orchestra album stream.
Wed.: Bourbon album stream.
Thu.: Probably Wasted Theory video premiere or otherwise Windhand review.
Fri.: King Buffalo interview… me.

A word about that last entry: Yes. Drummer Scott Donaldson from King Buffalo wanted to do an interview with me. He sent me questions and I answered them, and I’m going to post that on Friday. It was a fun, silly kind of thing, and it feels super-weird and self-glorifying in a way that makes me really, really uncomfortable, but it gives me another chance to talk about their new record, so whatever. I hate the thought of posting it like it’s some ego trip like who the fuck am I to think anyone gives a shit about anything I say other than “yo, riffs are cool,” but yeah. I’ve told myself I’m putting it up and in all likelihood, unless I can manage to talk myself out of it between now and then — as, rest assured, a big part of me is trying to do — it’ll be up sometime before the fest starts on Friday in Oslo.

Alright, that’s enough. It’s 5AM and time to put up the first of today’s six posts. Woof. Then maybe I’ll have some more coffee and read or go back upstairs and try to crash out for a bit until the baby gets up, which I expect he will within the hour. I was up a few times between when I first fell asleep at 9PM and 2:30AM when the alarm went off, so whether it’s during baby-nap or what, more sleep is probably going to happen today one way or another.

Have a great and safe weekend, and again, thank you for reading. Back Monday, and please check out the forum and the radio stream.

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