https://www.high-endrolex.com/18

Friday Full-Length: Primus, Sailing the Seas of Cheese

Posted in Bootleg Theater on October 28th, 2022 by JJ Koczan

Some records are just ingrained in you. As I remember it, I first encountered Primus‘ 1991 second album and major label debut, Sailing the Seas of Cheese, at about 10 years old in my sister’s CD collection. This would’ve been when it was more or less new, before the follow-up EP, 1992’s Miscellaneous Debris, because I remember when that came out. I swiped the disc and it was like my soon-to-be-pubescent, soon-to-meet-Beavis-and-Butt-Head goofball ass found a home. I’ve lived with it basically since that time, revisiting periodically, and it’s been a bit, so here I am. This album changed my life as a kid, and it still satisfies listening as an adult for more than nostalgic purposes. I count it as one among very, very few.

What a collection of songs. Into a 45-minute span, Primus — bassist/vocalist Les Claypool, guitarist Larry LaLonde, drummer Tim Alexander, plus a bunch of their friends peppered throughout — cram banger after banger. You’ve got the intro, and even that has a hook, then you get into “Here Come the Bastards,” “Sgt. Baker,” “American Life” and “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” in succession. Holy shit. And even more insane, they’re all so short. “Here Come the Bastards” is under three minutes. In less than three minutes, Primus build and launch that groove, establish and execute that chorus, and roll out a weighted tonality that still carries its heft while dancing in circles doing high-knees.

Across its span, Sailing the Seas of Cheese is a tighter record than 1990’s Frizzle Fry (discussed here), and the tradeoff it makes between atmosphere and impact serves cuts like “Sgt. Baker” — recall the first Gulf War was on when the album was being made — and the later “Tommy the Cat,” the frenetic jazz showoff “Is it Luck,” on which LaLonde shreds guitar and Alexander shreds drums no less than Claypool does bass, or the band as a whole does a number on ‘what makes a radio hit.’

Even the side B pairing of “Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers” and “Fish On (Fisherman Chronicles, Ch. II),” where they do branch out more than a little, is more delightfully odd, more weirdo psychedelic in the case of the latter — though as far out as they go into Interscope Records-backed avant garde heavy funk rock, they bring it back to the chorus before they’re done, because songwriting — and the manner in which the concluding “Los Bastardos” reprises the central progression of “Here Come the Bastards” with samples from The Young Ones laced over top is emblematic of the jam band Primus would become after reuniting in the aughts.

Consider “Eleven” — too offbeat to be a single, brilliantly drummed, catchy, something about salsa — and tucked in between “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” and “Is it Luck?” in arguably one of the least enviable positions a song from the ’90s could be in if it wanted to stand out, but it does. It’s got vibe and chorus both. It’s heavy, it’s undeniably their own, and it legitimately works in concert with the rest of the material here to do something in rock and roll that had never been done before. PRIMUS SAILING THE SEAS OF CHEESENot just decentralizing the guitar — because if you listen to this, Frizzle Fry, 1993’s Pork Soda, 1995’s Tales From the Punchbowl, etc., and there’s no shortage of guitar — but in songwriting and personality. This was a new kind of fun at the time, and resonates 31 years later not only because the level of craft is so high — that is, each of its three main players is brilliant — but because no one else in the last three-plus decades has managed to come along and outdo it at its own game.

The back and forth between faster and slower songs on side A, with “Here Come the Bastards” into “Sgt. Baker,” is mirrored by the dizzying “Is it Luck?” moving into the interlude “Grandad’s Little Ditty” before the “Tommy the Cat” — which, yes, has guest vocals from Tom Waits; nobody’s perfect — takes hold and builds an entire world in its 4:15, the sharp turns and razor wit of the lyrics one more reason to fully immerse. Side B’s personality is a little different, as it should be, with the banjo-inclusive “Sathington Waltz” feeling (purposefully) thrown together as if to signal that the rest of the proceedings are going to push even further into the reaches of peculiarity, which of course they do, however memorable “Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers” proves to be nonetheless.

And yes, “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” was a smash. Unavoidable for a bit there, and undeniable. As their career has played out, “Jerry Was a Race Car Driver” has followed Primus all the while, and I can’t even fathom how many times Claypool has chuckled and said, “Dog will hunt” into a microphone at this point. Thousands, surely. Doesn’t matter, the end of that track crushes, taking all that we’re-gonna-do-bass low end and pushing it alongside harder hitting drums and fuller guitar distortion to create a sound that Pork Soda and later records like 1997’s Brown Album and 1999’s Antipop would continue to explore, the band flirting with the idea that maybe they were a heavy metal band before pulling the plug on the whole endeavor for a few years and sending Claypool into a wilderness of side-projects, many of them righteous — you won’t hear me say a bad word about the Fearless Flying Frog Brigade, dammit; “who wants to go to D’s Diner?” — but all of them a signifier that there would only ever be one Primus.

They’ve been on tour this year covering Rush, which tracks. I’ve made the argument a few times over the years for Primus as a heavy rock band, and I still wonder how the late ’90s and early ’00s would have played out for them if that language existed at the time, because they’ve never been about the aggressive side of metal even as they more than flirted with tonal weight. Whatever they were going to be classified as, they’d always be themselves, surely, and Queens of the Stone Age did Ozzfest too that time, so I don’t know that being heavy rock would’ve prevented the hiatus that stopped the band for a long few years in 2000, but in hindsight, it’s an easier fit as a kind of creative ecosystem than either metal or hard rock, which is where they were most commonly lumped. I’ll gladly go to bat for them having more in common with Kyuss than Powerman 5000, or any other ’90s commercial hard rock entity you want to substitute.

But what is, is, and Sailing the Seas of Cheese remains a singular work of genius songwriting and performance, one of the best records of its decade, for me, one of the best records of all time, and as always, I hope you enjoy it.

Thanks for reading.

I needed this, I don’t mind telling you. This week has been long, hard and largely miserable. My knee is starting to get better — still hurts to straighten it out, but I can move it more — and this morning I go for the results of the MRI that I had done Wednesday evening, so that should be interesting [update: I need surgery], but everything has been a drag. Everything. It was my kid’s birthday — the only time in my life I’m going to get to see my child turn five — and I could barely stay in the room. It just sucked. Wretched, down. I’ve felt isolated in my marriage, utterly adrift as a parent, and completely inconsequential creatively. I keep fucking up like 10 different things at one time and even little things — I knocked over an open bottle of seltzer yesterday opening my laptop on one of the tables in back of Wegman’s; a beer bottle fell out of my cart in the liquor department as I was buying booze for The Pecan’s birthday party tomorrow; I dropped his ice cream cake the other night (fortunately it was okay) — make my brains fucking boil. I feel like I don’t have the capacity to handle as much is coming at me, and that’s before you get to the anxiety of a collapsing political order happening in real-time, my wife learning Hungarian as though I might do so through osmosis and somehow thereby be able to chase down EU citizenship through my family lineage. I feel like I should be granted a duel passport just by virtue of having to tell everyone I’ve ever met in my entire life how to pronounce my last name.

Anyway, Primus, some new Star Trek last night, good music throughout the week, a steady intake of THC and cheese, an unexpected gift that I’ll keep for the rest of my life, and I’m not sure I have any right to complain, but I do. It’s been a slaughter. I get up and want to fast-forward through the entire day and just go to bed. Just be done with it.

But that’s my shit and mine to deal with. In addition to the orthopaedist this morning, this afternoon is a parent-teacher conference — pretty light fare in pre-K, and we try to keep a close eye on how he’s doing anyway, so I don’t expect too many revelations, but still, you go — and then tomorrow is the big birthday party for the kid. Bounce house, pigs in blankets, The Patient Mrs.’ mom’s ziti; all the classics. We’re expecting about 40 people at various points in the afternoon, so if you want to come by, PM for the address.

New Gimme show today. 5pm. I know you don’t care or listen, but I’m lucky to do that stuff so I’m gonna keep plugging it anyhow. Thanks if you do check it out. It’s a good way for me to dig into more of the records that come in for review.

Next week, I don’t know, a bunch of stuff. Couple full streams, announcements, and so on. If I tell you it’ll be cool, will it matter? If you’re reading this now, will you come back because of the vague promise of something good? Probably not, I think. Maybe I’m getting too old for this shit; like a half-assed, lily white Danny Glover of the stoner rock blogosphere.

Have a great and safe weekend. Rest up, watch your head, enjoy. Thanks again for reading.

FRM.

The Obelisk Collective on Facebook

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch

Tags: , , , , , ,

Friday Full-Length: Primus, Frizzle Fry

Posted in Bootleg Theater on September 11th, 2020 by JJ Koczan

In terms of categorization, no one has ever really known what to make of or what to do with Primus. 30 years on from the 1990 release of their debut studio album, Frizzle Fry, through Caroline Records, that seems like a source of pride for the bass-led trio, whose career has nonetheless included radio hits and creative videos, narrative albums and a sense of progressivism that comes through even in the most straightforward of their songs and in tracks about things like fishing, pudding, and, on 1993’s Pork Soda, being named Mud. But because of their funk-infused sound, their overarching groove led by the technical-wizardry-put-to-rarely-pretentious-use of bassist Les Claypool, because of the intricacy of Tim “Don’t Call Me Herb” Alexander‘s drumming and the almost avant-jazz guitar work of Larry LaLonde — who came to the band after playing in Possessed, giving Primus an automatic connection to metal — theirs has always been a place between styles. How much crossover do you really think exists between Ozzfest and Bonnaroo? That’s Primus.

Frizzle Fry, which has been remastered and reissued through I think Sony or maybe Universal or whoever owns Interscope‘s and Caroline‘s catalogs at this point — does it matter? Brand X. — is comprised of 13 tracks running a CD-ready 51 minutes. There are numerous intros and interludes, even from the start of opener and longest cut (immediate points) “To Defy the Laws of Tradition,” which starts with crowd noise perhaps to make one think on first listen that they’re doing another live record à la 1989’s Suck on This, which was Primus overall debut. This and the waltzing “You Can’t Kill Michael Malloy,” the stomping “Sathington Willoughby” and the reprise “To Defy” at the album’s finish — all under 40 seconds long — act to keep the listener off balance and, ideally, of a more open mind to the many quirks that come not just from Claypool as a frontman, but LaLonde‘s guitar and Alexander‘s drumming as well. At its heaviest — and the record is heavy — Frizzle Fry doesn’t indulge in either the chestbeating of the day’s thrash and early groove metal movements or the preening of glam, or the disaffection of what was becoming grunge at the time. You see where this is going. It’s heavy, and it’s rock. It’s heavy rock.

It’s more than just that as well, but stop me if you’ve heard this before — and yes you have, maybe more than once — but among the aspects of Primus‘ sound that were pioneering was finding that precise place in between Primus Frizzle Frymetal and rock that was heavy and full in tone but put it to non-aggro use. Frizzle Fry has its moody moments, to be sure, in the still-relevant “Too Many Puppies” or the loosely psychedelic title-track and “The Toys Go Winding Down” and in the punch of low end and sometimes frenetic starts and stops of bass, but songs like “Mr. Knowitall,” “John the Fisherman,” “Pudding Time” even “Harold of the Rocks,” though its lyrics are about losing friends to drug addiction, are fun. The bounce of their rhythm, their memorable hooks and melodies, and the immediately-recognizable patterning and voice of Claypool gave Primus an unmistakable approach to rock and roll. And that was part of the thing too. Where a few years later, Nirvana broke through to generation-defining commercial mega-stardom, Primus were too weird and too inimitable to be as influential. Anyone can slow down punker riffs and drawl out their dissatisfaction with life. No one can slap a bass like Les Claypool other than Les Claypool, and those who try, like Korn, just sound silly. So while they found success at the time, they’re perhaps also underappreciated for just how much stylistic accomplishment they were making at the time because, frankly, their style was more their own than behind their marketing knew how to handle. “I guess put out another CD single? Yeah, that’s it,” and so on.

Make no mistake, Frizzle Fry is brilliant, and whether it’s dug in moments like the hard-driving jam that emerges to add thrust to the title-track after its Sabbath referencing post-midsection departure or even the probably-filler “Spaghetti Western” with its double-kick drumming and shredded-apart guitar solo, Primus maintain a striking and consuming balance between personality and craft. Thinking of this as their debut, their efforts across the length of the album are all the more impressive, and of course while they would go on to develop a more varied and progressive approach over subsequent records and decades, the raw edge of a band just starting out is resonant in Frizzle Fry at the same time it’s contrasted by the sheer confidence with which the band executes the material. Maybe they just didn’t care what anyone thought of them. Maybe they knew they were right and time would bear them out. Either way, with 30 years of hindsight and the language and understanding of heavy rock and roll that’s taken place since, one can find yet another lens through which to appreciate what they were doing at the time, what they were able to achieve as a band in their early going, and what they would do with it in the course of the years that followed.

The band are hardly done, if that sentence makes it seem otherwise. In 2017 they released The Desaturating Seven, a narrative concept LP following up on 2014’s Primus & The Chocolate Factory with the Fungi Ensemble, a characteristic retell of the songs from Willy Wonka, and they’ve toured consistently as well, returning in 2004 after a breakup following the harder-edged approaches of 1997’s The Brown Album and 1999’s Antipop, lineup changes and so on. Frizzle Fry, 1991’s Sailing the Seas of Cheese and the aforementioned Pork Soda have all been performed in their entirety in the last decade-plus, usually with copious jams added — the jam-band community wholly embraced the three-piece in a way metal never really did, perhaps with an edge of ’90s nostalgia — and comprise an essential trilogy of offerings to be sure. As the first of them, Frizzle Fry holds a special place and is a landmark unto itself as well as a herald for what would come after.

If it needs to be said, I love this album.

I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

Maybe I was feeling a little nostalgic myself this week after reviewing that Alice in Chains tribute. That album, Dirt, and Sailing the Seas of Cheese, along with C.O.C.’s Blind and Master of Puppets and The Beatles’ Past Masters Vol. 1, were the earliest CDs I ever owned. I had that Beatles record and Master of Puppets before I even had a CD player. So yeah, that’s kind of digging back for me. Life is short. Find joy where you can.

I mean that. Half the country is on fire right now; the other half doesn’t care. Fascism has taken root in US politics in a way that the generation who would most recognize it is too dead or too on board with it to call out. Facts are twisted past recognition so that truth and objectivity themselves — as much as they can exist in the first place — are rendered another malleable tool of disorientation. And a pandemic. I watch the cases every day. It was down this week to in the 20,000s for like two days, is back up today over 33,000. We’re approaching 200,000 dead Americans. No one cares. Cops act in accord with white supremacist terrorists. People care about that, but cops have tanks and people have Twitter and tanks win. I have this dog I can’t stand. It’s not even fair how much I can’t stand this dog. It isn’t fair to her and I know it and acknowledge it and I still can’t stand this dog. Every time she whines or barks I want to smash my face with a hammer. Bottom line is, injustice is rampant.

So find your joy. Because in the background of all this wretchedness and decay dwells the fact that these so, so, so deeply flawed times are all we’ve got. This week I bought my son a big green garbage truck at Costco. He’s got other garbage trucks, also green. I can think of two off the top of my head — a little one and a mid-sized one. This one is bigger and it has an arm that lifts up a dumpster. He’s spent the last three days immersed in it to the exclusion of nearly everything else, or at least everything that can’t fit in the truck, and I’ve gotten to see him absolutely loving this thing, wanting to bring it to bed with him, all of that. It’s been great. He talks about it. It’s the first thing he goes for in the morning. Next week it’ll be something else, but screw it, that’s next week. Right now I’ve got that to hold onto.

And I need it, because he’s also decided this week that he no longer needs a nap in the afternoon, which is so sad. So very sad. That was not only work-time, but also relax-time, reading-time, listen-to-what-needs-to-be-reviewed-tomorrow-time. Put cauliflower in the oven for dinner time. Sometimes even my naptime. A time both productive and restorative. Now it’s two more hours-plus added to the rest of the day. Find your joy. The world he lives in and is going to grow up in is an overwhelming downward spiral moving from garbage to garbage-on-fire, and nothing’s going to get better. Life is complicated and generally miserable. Find your joy. Big or little, if you can. Double high-five.

Oh, and by way of an update, it’s been two weeks and nothing has fallen through, so I guess we own this house now. Pretty wild to think of it as ours rather than my grandmother’s or my grandmother’s-via-my-mother’s. White privilege is real.

Alright. I should probably leave it there. I overslept this morning by more than an hour — alarm set for 3:50, I rolled over at 5 — and it’s kind of thrown me for a loop, but so it goes. I’ll take The Pecan grocery shopping in a bit and we’ll proceed about the day. I’m sure the garbage truck will be involved. Next week is a new Gimme show and a bunch of other premieres that anyone may or may not give a crap about but I think are cool. Some honest-to-goodness stoner rock in there too, which I could use at this point to be honest with you. Been awfully prog-psych around here lately. Also there’s some folk. So you keep a balance. You find your joy. But anyway, time’s a crunch since I overslept.

I wish you a great and safe weekend. Have fun, and be careful out there. Hydrate. So important to hydrate.

FRM.

The Obelisk Forum

The Obelisk Radio

The Obelisk merch

Tags: , , , , ,

Friday Full-Length: Monster Magnet, Spine of God

Posted in Bootleg Theater on September 27th, 2014 by JJ Koczan

Monster Magnet, Spine of God (1991)

Nothing against SPV Records — their reissue of Spine of God and other earlier Monster Magnet albums was fair game as they were out of print and unavailable to a bunch of fans who came aboard during the band’s more commercial hard rock era — but if you want to listen to Spine of God, you really need to go for the original. Caroline Records, in a jewel case, some of the finest heavy psych rock ever crafted. Still ahead of its time. We’re still playing catchup to where Spine of God is at. We’ll get there one of these days, then we’ll all crack our skulls doing airplanes and get our heads just right and so on. Cover me with skin and hair. Fucking a.

Spine of God is more than a great Monster Magnet record — they’ve got a few by now — but an absolute landmark. In New Jersey, the state in which I was born and raised, an entire generation of bands came up in the wake of Monster Magnet‘s branching out, and that scene is still going, moving forward. So are Monster Magnet, albeit with a much different lineup than they had 23 years ago, but to go back and look at the development of Red Bank, NJ, as a center in which heavy rock flourished on the East Coast in bands like GodspeedCoreThe Atomic BitchwaxSolarized, later Halfway to GoneSolace, The Ribeye Bros., and on and on, Monster Magnet are a big branch on that bizarre family tree, and Spine of God, which was their debut — to mix metaphors — was the root for a lot of what came after. Add to all that it’s an absolute masterpiece, and yeah, I’m gonna close out the week with it.

I’ll further admit that while it was ultimately the classicitude of Spine of God which made me break it out on this late night/early morning, a close second in motivation was the band’s upcoming Milking the Stars, the November release of which was announced earlier this month. I’ve been spending a lot of time with that record, which is comprised of reworked tracks from Monster Magnet‘s 2013 opus, Last Patrol (review here), as well as the previously unreleased title-cut and some other odds and ends, and almost as much as I dig what frontman/songwriter/founder Dave Wyndorf did in remaking the songs, I think the adventurous spirit of the album and the willingness to screw with work that by most definitions would be “finished” already emphasizes a lot of what’s made Monster Magnet so great all these years, and bodes ridiculously well for their proper follow-up to Last Patrol, since basically they can go anywhere at this point. I’ll have a review up of Milking the Stars sometime in the next month or so, but it’s on my mind already.

Enjoy Spine of God. It’s one of my favorite records.

Is is really three in the morning? Ah jeez. I rolled in not at all long ago from seeing Uncle Acid and the Deadbeats and Danava in New York. Quite a night. I was going to go to Boston last night, but as I mentioned on Thee Facebooks, it was my 10th wedding anniversary — the only holiday about which I give even the remotest of fucks — and, well, 10 years isn’t nothing. Kind of a big deal. If it was seven years, or some other in-between number, I might be able to get away with that. But 10? Nah. As of Sunday, The Patient Mrs. and I will have been together for a total of 17 years, which is more than half of both of our lives. Wild to think about. How stupid lucky I am.

Next week though I’ll review the Uncle Acid gig, and I’ve also got a new track from Eternal Tapestry going up on Monday. If I’m up to it Sunday, I might put up the first recorded demo from Righteous Bloom, which is the new spinoff band from Beelzefuzz. And of course there’s the podcast. Thanks if you got to check that out. Apparently I’m up to 40 of them. Got a thing for round numbers lately, I suppose.

Obviously there’s a lot more than that to come, but I have no idea what it might be. The Patient Mrs. and I are in Connecticut for the weekend, celebrando, so at least I didn’t have to go all the way back to Massachusetts tonight. Felt good to be back in New York. Even Manhattan on a Friday night, which is nightmare of inflated ego, inflated bank accounts and terrifying hawtness. Good to go a show there, I guess. City still smells like pee. I had some point about being in Connecticut. It’s long gone. God damn this Monster Magnet record is awesome.

Have a great and safe weekend. PLEASE check out the forum and radio stream.

The Obelisk Forum

The Obelisk Radio

Tags: , , , , ,

Duuude, Tapes!: Monster Magnet, 25 …..Tab

Posted in Duuude, Tapes! on November 28th, 2012 by JJ Koczan

First of all, I know one of the big gripes with tapes is that they look lousy, not enough artwork, and so forth, but Monster Magnet‘s 25 …..Tab looks friggin’ awesome. The half-Planet of the Apes Bullgod Statue of Liberty’s extended arm draws the eye vertically in a way it never did on CD or vinyl, and the cardboard stock of the liner is durable enough to stand up to the ages it’s already seen.

I picked up 25 …..Tab recently at Sound Exchange, my local CD joint in Wayne. They have a whole wall of tapes and they’re usually a little on the expensive side for what I’m willing to shell out on a cassette, but I think they’re just as happy to have the room, which if you’ve ever tried to walk down either of the two aisles in the place you’ll know is in short supply. In the end, it cost me circa $5, and has proved worth every penny.

The album is readily available on CD. SPV reissued it and Monster Magnet‘s 1991 landmark Spine of God debut in 2006, and it was out before that as well. I have those editions, but this tape is the original US issue on Caroline Records from 1993. That’s still two years after it came out in Europe on Glitterhouse, but it’s the earliest domestic release and it’s 20 years ago either way and I was stoked to find it. With just the four tracks “Tab…,” “25,” “Longhair” and “Lord 13,” it’s as psychedelic as Monster Magnet ever got during this era of the band.

Or, you know, any other, since it was their most psychedelic era.

And their ultra Hawkwindian jamming on “Tab…” comes across excellently on the tape, sounding all the more raw and classically compressed. The song is an EP unto itself at over half an hour long, and it takes up the entirety of side A, which makes “25,” “Longhair” and “Lord 13” something like an incremental return to earth, the latter being the most straightforward of the bunch, despite all the backing mouth noises and echoes from Dave Wyndorf, whistles and guitar effects and the rest built around a solid guitar strum and percussion line.

By the time they get there, it’s been a long trip. “Tab…” was always considered an EP even though technically speaking it’s has more of a runtime than Spine of God, and its relative obscurity in the Monster Magnet catalog is no less a factor two decades on than it ever was, considering nobody’s sure yet what to call the damn thing, whether it’s Tab, Tab 25, 25 Tab, or 25 …..Tab, which I took right off the cover. Any name you give it, however, it remains unique in the band’s discography and as warped a tape as you could ever hope to find.

Tags: , , , , ,