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Buried Treasure: Neil Fallon and How You too Can be an Instant Winner

Posted in Buried Treasure on August 1st, 2012 by JJ Koczan

I was avoiding work recently, as I have a tendency to do when there’s a lot of it. Dicking around on eBay in my usual scouring the intertubes for Clutch promos, I did a search specifically for frontman Neil Fallon‘s name, to see perhaps if his advice book on beard maintenance (that’s not a real thing) had come out yet, or if there might be some oddity I’d missed along the way.

One look through the CD category later, I stumbled on a CDR for sale in a slimline jewel case of the Fallon solo single “Instant Winner.” The song originally appeared on the 2003 Chrome Peeler Records compilation You’ve Got Your Orders Volume One, but this was marked as being the unmastered final mix of the track. And it was the label itself selling it. Having been involved in the past in the compilation procedure, I knew that generally tracks are turned in in final mix form, then the whole thing is mastered together.

So it didn’t seem unreasonable for me to presume that this could be the disc that Fallon turned in as his contribution to the comp, the project of which was that Chrome Peeler dealt out song titles to a variety of artists — House of Low Culture, Erik Larson, Hella and Thurston Moore all appear on Volume One, among many others — and told them to work from that. Hence the giving of orders. Fallon turned “Instant Winner” into a smooth-sounding acoustic psych pop, reminiscent more of Mollusk-era Ween than his own work in Clutch, with a higher-register vocal to go with.

Of course, Fallon is still immediately identifiable by the rhythm of his delivery, and whether or not this is the actual CDR he sent Chrome Peeler to be included on You’ve Got Your Orders, it’s still a pretty cool listen and I’ve got no regrets for picking it up. If you haven’t heard it before, here’s an HD version of the finished product:

And Chrome Peeler has made the entirety of You’ve Got Your Orders Volume One available via their Bandcamp site, if you want to hear more.

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