With clarion fuzz that continues to resonate, Fu Manchu‘s third album, In Search Of…, was released Feb. 27, 1996, just about 30 years ago. Produced by the band — it was the last go for the lineup of guitarist/vocalist Scott Hill, bassist Brad Davis, lead guitarist Eddie Glass and drummer Ruben Romano — with Brian Jenkins, who also mixed (Eddy Schreyer at Future Disc Systems mastered), it remains a standard to which bands aspire, and songs like “Regal Begal,” “Asphalt Risin’,” “Redline,” “The Falcon Has Landed,” “Cyclone Launch” and others might still show up in a live set. It is a landmark and not the San Clemente, California, four-piece’s last.

It runs 12 tracks and 40 minutes and burns just about from start to finish. The band, while not having abandoned their punkish beginnings, had taken creative steps across their first two full-lengths, 1994’s No One Rides for Free (discussed here) and 1995’s Daredevil (review here), that not only placed them at the forefront of a post-grunge stoner rock push at the time — their sound was different from the desert hues of Kyuss or the concurrent self-titled-era Clutch, or the tripped out weirdoism of Monster Magnet, but these acts were lumped together as kin just the same — but remains a blueprint of inimitable tone and presence. Hill‘s vocals, pushed down in the mix, enhance the impact of the riffs he’s following, and his, Glass‘ and Davis‘ tones throughout are like Gossamer from Looney Tunes in the amount of hair on them.

A boogie cut like “Redline,” or a swirling shove like “Seahag,” a roller like “Cyclone Launch” or the nailed-the-tempo nod of “Missing Link,” could do different things, but tone and groove unites the material across In Search Of…, and despite being nothing if not straightforward in its intentions toward riffs, hooks and liberally strewn shred, the album’s overarching atmosphere is one of its most enduring strengths. It is definitively SoCal, but with a new generational interpretation. If you believe place can inform art — and I very much do, because duh — then there’s no removing the sun and warmth of Southern California from Fu Manchu.

They weren’t the first, of course, to speak to where they were coming from. From The Beach Boys to Black Flag to various pop takes throughout the prior three/four decades, Fu Manchu were on well-trod ground, but their angle of approach was their own, definitely on the first two records as well, but more here. The crunch that emerges in “Neptune’s Convoy” may have come out of Hill‘s early days in hardcore punk, but the trippy comedown and volume trades, the ensuing nod, and the vibe were definitively something else; not grunge, not metal, not hard rock or punk, but pulling from all of them in its making. Beyond surf rock, Fu Manchu surfed. Beyond skate punk, Fu Manchu were ready when the second Tony Hawk game came calling a couple years later. In ways that would inform the work they’ve done across the three decades since, In Search Of…‘s radness was as much a part of its makeup as the wah is in “Strato-Streak.”

It was somewhere else skaters, surfers, slackers and stoners could go, and as much as it can feel frontloaded with “Regal Begal,” “Missing Link” and “Asphalt Risin'” coming in hot ahead of the slowdown in “Neptune’s Convoy,” that song and the penultimate, two-and-a-half-minute Sabbath-blues riffer “The Bargain” speak to just how cool the Fu could play it when they weren’t aiming for charge. A song like “Solid Hex,” also on the shorter end, could revel in noise and conjure a wash of distortion — without losing the album’s sense of momentum, mind you — but “The Bargain” spoke to ’70s and ’80s rock like few in the 1990s were willing to do. Maybe that’s true of Glass‘ soloing throughout, or the cowbell on “Cyclone Launch,” or “Redline” with its push to the finish, but there too, Fu Manchu brought a new creative voice and point-of-view to what had been done before.

Part of that is a sense of freedom. Maybe that sounds corny, and I’ll readily agree that the word has been coopted by generations of assholes, particularly in this country but others as well, to mean any number of things from the repression of women to being a crypto-marketing buzzword. But the freedom I’m talking about is both nothing so grand and far more encompassing. It’s doing what you want without giving in to the bullshit around you. It’s not only finding your voice, but broadcasting it. It’s about identity in a way, but about holding the self against notions of what’s expected of you, of conforming to some notion. Fu Manchu were never going to be metal, and they were never going to be punk any more than they were going to be surf rock or ’70s heavy, but they found a way to appeal to all sides by refusing to compromise on who they were as artists.

In Search Of… doesn’t come off as immediately ambitious in this or really any other regard. Its outward face is, again, straightforward. Verses, choruses, solo. It’s not experimentalism, and yet for being so undeniably itself, it refuses to fit into easy classification enough that it’s part of the reason ‘stoner rock,’ as a genre, took shape at all during these years. It was an alternative to the mainstream beyond the mainstream-approved ‘alternative rock’ that was all over the radio and MTV circa ’96, and it was both a party and substantial unto itself. Heavy rock and roll, laid out in a manner characteristically void of pretense and yet seemingly in defiance of so much that was happening around it. There’s no easy, direct line that leads to Fu Manchu in terms of influences. Even Black Sabbath — the grandaddy of them all — only partially apply as an influence. In the parlance of our times, what Fu Manchu accomplished here was low-key amazing. Except if you count all the volume and movement, it’s not really low-key at all.

And maybe that’s why bands are still learning from it 30 years later. As always, I hope you enjoy.

Thanks for reading.

—

Hey, thanks for reading.

A lot of this week was spent catching up from being away at the end of last week and over the weekend. That Hashtronaut news post today, for example, and others throughout the week. I wanted to review a compilation (I know, comp reviews…) this week but didn’t get to, so it’ll have to be next week, although I’ve already got a Stonus premiere lined up for Monday and I also want to review the new one from Finland’s Mount Palatine, which is cosmic and huge and awesome.

Then you get to stuff like the new All Them Witches single out today, a DVNE live record I haven’t even mentioned, Crippled Black Phoenix’s new album, Bong Voyage signing to Ripple and more tours and fest announcements besides and yeah, I’m pretty behind. That’s life. I’ll catch up on as much as I can.

In about an hour, The Patient Mrs. and I have yet another meeting at The Pecan’s school, this one with her teacher about what work she’s doing in class, as we’re still pretty in the dark on how her IEP is being implemented, and while we get updates on her compliance during a given day — that is, how much shit she’s talking about having to do whatever she’s being asked to do; usually plenty; from 9:58AM: “During our reading block, [The Pecan] was disrespectful towards another student while they were reading.”; never what happened or more about a situation, just ‘your kid was a problem in this way hindering our operational convenience’; I have come to care less and less about said convenience over the last three years — we generally have no idea as regards any academic work she might actually be doing. She tells us very little, and she’s eight, so grain of salt applies. She likes the iPad she plays on when she gets all her compliance points, and they use that to coerce her into doing shit. I do the same thing at home. The difference is I’m a shitty dad and these are professionals. That there isn’t some better system to implement that might — gasp — actually engage a child in a positive way rather than be reactive in a negative one is disappointing to say the least.

That’s stress, but so is everything.

I didn’t get a lot of time to play Zelda this week — I had Wind Waker going for like five minutes the other day but that’s it — but I did play my own Tears of the Kingdom game (as opposed to the one on the modded Switch or the one on the Switch 2 that was the family’s save file) for a while on the planes to and from Las Vegas last week/Monday and that was a fun visit. I did the circuit of lynels, picked hearty raddishes, slaughtered bokoblins in not-terribly-creative ways and had a good time chasing down materials and weapons just basically to do it. The story and such on that file are done, but I’ll keep it going anyway just for the inventory and a bit of fun. A different appeal than the modded game.

I’ve been watching Starfleet Academy with The Patient Mrs., and that’s alright. They managed to get some DS9 lore in there this week and that was cool, and some of the characters are engaging. The references feel like fan-service, which, yes, they absolutely are, and like other shows of its ‘generation’ — that is, like other Star Trek incarnations under the direction of Alex Kurtzman — like Discovery or Picard or Strange New Worlds, it’s heavy-handed emotionally. Part of that too in this case is the show’s intended Y.A. style, but I have a hard time imagining ‘the kids’ hanging around getting suddenly interested in the mystery of what happened to Captain Benjamin Sisko. I, on the other hand, liked it a lot, despite not being the intended audience.

Let’s leave it there since it’s just about time for me to get ready to head out. Gotta put together The Pecan’s lunch ahead of that meeting because I won’t get back in time otherwise to do so. Have a great, safe, hydrated and unhindered-by-assholes weekend. I’ll be back Monday with that Stonus premiere and we’re on from there.

FRM.

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Tags: California, Fu Manchu, Fu Manchu In Search Of, In Search Of, Mammoth Records, San Clemente

This entry was posted on Friday, February 6th, 2026 at 11:24 am and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.