Album Review: El Perro, Hair Of…
The roots of San Diego-based hard funk-informed classic heavy and psychedelic rockers El Perro go back at least to Fall 2019. At that point, Parker Griggs — who discussed starting the band here — had a handful of demos and was looking to play out and experiment beyond the sonic reaches of his main outfit, the power trio Radio Moscow. I won’t speculate as to the ultimate status of that blues-ripper trio (sleeping, maybe?), who released their last album in Sept. 2017 through Century Media and obviously were unable to tour the last couple years as they otherwise might have, but Hair Of… is the debut from El Perro that brings Griggs back to Radio Moscow‘s former label, Alive Records, and finds him fronting the four-piece alongside rhythm guitarist Holland Redd, bassist Shawn Davis and drummer Lonnie Blanton (the latter also a Radio Moscow alum), as well as producing with engineering and mixing by Mike Butler at Singing Serpent in San Diego.
Griggs (who also handles percussion throughout) wrote the music and lyrics and arranged the nine-included tracks — eight on the vinyl, as “O’ Grace” is a CD bonus — as the liner insert on the disc states in no uncertain terms, and from opener “The Mould” onward, Hair Of… bears many of the hallmarks of his craft, be it his bluesy vocal delivery or head-spinning guitar shred. The context in which those happen is somewhat changed, and though one is maybe most reminded of the 2007 self-titled Radio Moscow debut in terms of the overall sound in these tracks, El Perro bring a distinct enough vibe — not to mention different players and a rhythm guitar behind the spinning-in-a-circle-from-channel-to-channel solos of “The Mould,” “Take Me Away,” “Breaking Free,” and so on — to warrant being a new band.
Funk is the key, if El Perro is to be the vehicle through which Griggs explores the ’70s-era work of acts like Funkadelic circa Let’s Take it to the Stage or Cymande or Demon Fuzz, among a slew of others in and out of the psych-soul Norman Whitfield oeuvre, then he’s done well in bringing those sounds into the context of his songwriting. Most of the tracks under four minutes long save for the second, “No Harm” (5:49) and the LP-closing jam-out “Black Days” (12:01) — and yes, panned solos abound in both — and Hair Of… on the whole is a flood of energy in its delivery, with side B pieces like “Crazy Legs” and the subsequent, aptly-named-what-with-all-that-sitar “Sitar Song” seeming to push even the freneticism of the earlier, tambourine-inclusive “K. Mt” to another level of thrust.
Much of the album seems to deal with a kind of restlessness, between “The Mould” (about breaking it), “Take Me Away,” “Breaking Free,” “Crazy Legs” and maybe even “Black Days,” but the overall vibe of El Perro‘s first offering isn’t so much dark as blinding. That’s not to say there aren’t dynamics at work, as “Take Me Away” begins with a wispy, Eddie–Hazel-warming-up jam as it comes together around mid-tempo progression that’s a highlight both in swing, its rare layered vocals, and the mellower shove, not so much daring you to try to keep pace with it as Hair Of… might elsewhere as slowing down just a smidge to let you catch up.
Likewise, as the wah at the outset of “Breaking Free” seems to pull direct from the hard funk playbook (not a complaint), it sets up a groove of percussion-laced psychedelic funk that feels like it’s just waiting for the Echoplex to get back from the repair shop. For those familiar with Griggs‘ work at the head of Radio Moscow, the general vibe of “No Harm” should be recognizable, but it’s impossible to ignore the branching out from that happening as well, even in the guitar, which in the second half of the song takes on a kind of string-effect, bouncing from note to note as a violin might, hand-percussion layered behind it to keep the always-crucial sense of movement going behind the particularly-exploratory-feeling stretch-out. They bring it back around to the full-band jam, solos tripping from one channel to the other before consuming both, and find their way back to the central riff, leaving that mellower start to “Take Me Away” to handle the recovery.
If there was indeed a mould that it was the band’s intention to defy, their blend of funk and heavy rock will no doubt earn them some followers, and it’s easy to think both because of Griggs‘ years of notoriety and classic-heavy guitar heroism in Radio Moscow and because of the combination of breadth and shake-your-ass force that carries into “Crazy Legs” and the aforementioned CD-bonus “O’ Grace,” which is also shorter, thereby making a suitable epilogue to “Black Days,” that El Perro might find their way into an influential position, but at its core, it’s still very much a guitar-based release, however much percussion surrounds.
Boxes are ticked in terms of arrangement. The keys that (unless I’m hearing things) show up on “Crazy Legs” and seem to run alongside the guitar, for example, or the sitar in “Sitar Song” — which is a highlight both for its two minutes of dizzying fretwork and the subsequent 40-seconds-or-so of drift leading into “Black Days,” which, if you’ve been waiting the whole time to find out when El Perro were going to loosen up and really space out, it’s in the 12-minute LP capper, which blasts through the atmosphere with its initial verses before at 4:28 shifting into a percussion-led (for now), rainstick-yes jam that’s ultimately a drum highlight before twisting back into the psychedelic triumph that seems to stand not only for itself but for Hair Of… as a whole. Each song has something to stand it out from the others, which along with the casual inclusion of “O’ Grace” speaks to there being more material than was skillfully carved to present this full-length.
Thinking of Hair Of… as a debut, there are myriad ways the band might grow as they move forward, taking the arrangements here of hand drums, tambourine, various clacking items and so on and pushing them further, or adventuring into other instrumentation, but much of the identity in these songs comes from the guitar work, and considering who’s behind that, there’s no fodder for complaint. Whatever their future might bring, Hair Of… is a burner that stands out for engaging with funk as it does and winding up neither in a mire of cultural appropriation nor a retread of past ideas. It sounds fresh, and so it is. And one imagines that, taken to the stage, these songs are all the more powerful, swinging and swaggering.
