Posted in Whathaveyou on September 2nd, 2026 by JJ Koczan
I mean, yeah, duh, right? Nebula and Fu Manchu at Mojave Experience? They were the most ‘desert’ bands who didn’t actually live in the desert when they first got going in the 1990s, so it seems only fair that both acts would partake of the celebration next March. Legends of fuzz with an intertwined history, and all. Makes an awful lot of sense.
What I don’t know is how many more lineup additions Mojave Experience 2027 still has to unveil. I mean, they’ve already broken out C.O.C. and Nebula, the Fu, Red Fang, Brant Bjork and Fatso Jetson, and not that there aren’t a ton of other additions they could make — there are always more bands — but even for a three-dayer, the bill is starting to look pretty packed. I’ll keep an eye out, but so far it’s been a pleasure to watch this one shape up as it has.
From socials:
Mojave Experience – March 19–21, 2027 Joshua Tree Lake, California
Fu Manchu
Some bands belong in the desert.
Fu Manchu is one of them.
Emerging from the ashes of the Southern California hardcore band Virulence in 1990, Fu Manchu took a different path. The tempos changed, the guitars got thicker, and over the next three decades they developed a sound that would become instantly recognizable.
Albums like In Search Of…, The Action Is Go, Eatin’ Dust and King of the Road became essential records of the heavy underground. Fuzzed-out guitars, huge riffs and a deep groove became the foundation of a sound that has influenced generations of bands.
Their legendary status wasn’t created overnight. It came from decades of records, relentless touring and staying unmistakably Fu Manchu through all of it. More than thirty years later, very few bands can hit those first few notes and be identified immediately.
And they aren’t living on the past. In 2024, Fu Manchu released The Return of Tomorrow, their first studio album in six years and their first double album of new material. The record splits its 13 tracks between the massive fuzz and riffs they’re known for and a second side that stretches into slower, more spacious territory. More than three decades in, Fu Manchu are still finding new ground without losing the sound that made them who they are.
And there is something about this music that makes sense in the Mojave.
Open ground. Mountains in the distance. The last light disappearing from the sky. Then that wall of Fu Manchu fuzz moving across the desert with nothing around to contain it.
This is music born in Southern California finally getting the setting it deserves.
Fu Manchu in the Mojave Desert.
You need to be there for this one.
Nebula
NEBULA is coming to Mojave Experience 2027.
Anyone who has seen NEBULA live knows the records only tell part of the story. Eddie Glass can take a song and stretch it until the whole room seems to move with it. Riffs drift into long psychedelic passages, the guitars get buried in fuzz and feedback, and then somehow it all finds its way back to the groove.
There’s a strange energy to a NEBULA show. It can feel loose and almost out of control one minute, then completely locked in the next. That unpredictability is a big part of what makes seeing them live such an experience.
NEBULA came out of the late ’90s California underground and built their own place where psychedelic rock, blues, garage and massive guitar fuzz all meet. More than 25 years later, they still sound like NEBULA. Nobody polished the edges off.
This is a band that belongs and needs to be heard in the desert.
Artists Playing: Corrosion of Conformity Fu Manchu Red Fang Fatso Jetson Nebula Sasquatch Brant Bjork Trio Big Scenic Nowhere Mondo Generator earthlings? High Desert Queen Black Moon Cult Heavy Temple Deathchant Yawning Balch Unida Sons of Arrakis Magick Potion 20 Watt Tombstone
Released less than one full years ago, on Aug. 1, 2025, The Return Of… Live is the latest release in the to-date Fu Manchu catalog. It was put together as a limited-to-1,500 pressing of single LPs (they also made CDs) with nine tracks included. And at first, if that notion raised an eyebrow for some listeners — a single-LP Fu Manchu live album — I get it. In 2019, Fu Manchu‘s in-house label, At the Dojo Records, partnered with Roadburn Records to dig out the archival Live at Roadburn 2003, and that also had nine songs. But it was a festival set.
This isn’t. The Return Of… Live — both a nod to 2024’s The Return of Tomorrow (discussed here, review here) and to the first real resumption of a touring cycle the band had after the covid-19 pandemic — isn’t a single set. The release announcement quoted founding guitarist/vocalist Scott Hill as saying, “These nine songs were recorded during our 2024 The Return of Tomorrow UK/European tour. We had a great time at all of the shows and the crowds were amazing. We have been lucky enough to tour for the past 35 years and the songs on this album are some of our favorite old ones and new ones.”
If you want context, as Fu Manchu were playing that Roadburn set 23 years ago when drummer Scott Reeder was still brand new in the band alongside Hill, bassist Brad Davis and lead guitarist Bob Balch — the current, steady lineup finally established — they also put out what was their first official live record, Go for It… Live! (discussed here), which was similarly culled from recordings on tour. It was 22 tracks. It couldn’t even fit on a single CD, let alone a 12″.
So what gives? To me it strikes as a simple cost/benefit analysis. In 2003, Fu Manchu weren’t yet running their own label, and the entire ecosystem of releasing physical media was different. The Return Of… Live wasn’t made so a casual listener could walk into a Best Buy and pick it up off a rack. It was made so that fans who just had their asses handed to them at a show could head over to the merch table and support the band directly while getting something new in trade.
And the key part of that is the “something new.” It’s what Hill said as well: “some of our favorite old ones and new ones.” Showcasing new material was the priority. The tracklisting bears that out, not just in the songs from The Return of Tomorrow that feature — the maddeningly catchy “Loch Ness Wrecking Machine” and “Hands of the Zodiac,” as well as “The Return of Tomorrow” itself — but also the title-cut from 2018’s Clone of the Universe (discussed here, review here), which kind of undersells the value of that album but you can’t have everything, and “Dimension Shifter” from 2014’s Gigantoid (discussed here, review here), which began their At the Dojo Records era.
These newer songs land heavy alongside classics “Eatin’ Dust” — which makes a rousing and unexpected opener — “California Crossing,” “Hell on Wheels” and “Saturn III,” the latter of which closes. Jim Monroe, who’s been at the helm periodically throughout the last 11 years, mixes, and while Hill‘s voice has clearly changed in the 20-plus years since Go For It… Live!, sounding lower and more guttural but still clear, the grooves and shove of the older material remains, and the newer songs are vibrant in collusion with them. Fu Manchu have rarely been a band to radically depart their songwriting modus, but the last 12 years or so have seen them push the boundaries of what they can do with their music, whether that’s breaking their LP-every-few-years convention for the series of three Fu30 EP (discussed here) releases marking their 30th anniversary or formatting The Return of Tomorrow as their first studio 2LP with a specific intent to letting (digital) listeners jumble their own tracklisting.
Those aren’t things that the band would’ve or could’ve done in the ’90s when they were still hashing out both their lineup and aesthetic, but The Return Of… Live comes across in no small part as a victory lap for their meta-creativity, as well as a chance for longtime or newcomer fans to have live versions of these songs in their collection and help sustain the band on the road financially, which I don’t note as a negative or a criticism in the slightest. Band’s gotta live, and it could hardly be more fitting for Fu Manchu to do that on their own terms.
That drive toward individualism is part of Fu Manchu‘s character these 35-plus years on from their founding, as essential as the fuzz-heavy rock they helped pioneer, recognized in flashes of commercial potential like their appearance on the 2000 soundtrack of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 or any number of other movies and games, if not in the basic longevity and continued relevance of a band who’ve been developing and applying their craft for so long and seen so much else — culturally speaking — come and go in that time. Fu Manchu predate the internet in your house, not just on your phone. They may yet outlive it entirely.
Because of course they’re still a working band. They have anniversary reissues slated this year for ’90s landmarks, and they’ll be at festivals in Europe for most of the summer. At some point maybe in another year or two, they’ll get to work on another album, and in the meantime, there are copious side-projects around whatever Fu Manchu are doing in a given stretch, whether it’s Balch (Big Scenic Nowhere, Slower, Yawning Balch, Axe Dragger, etc.), Davis (Gods of Sometimes, Davis) or Reeder (Jacket Thief). Beyond that coming tour, I don’t know what the future has in store, but I feel like Fu Manchu didn’t become one of the most reliable guitar-driven outfits in the history of recorded music by taking either themselves, their processes or their fans for granted, and that if you’re making a bet, betting on them is one of the safest you could ever hope to make.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading this low-key catalog series of Friday Full-Lengths. It probably won’t be the last, but it’s the longest I’ve done thus far and it’s been a pleasure to dig into these records; each week looking forward to a bit of Fu on Friday. If you kept up, I appreciate it.
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Damn, it’s noon. I did two interviews this week. One with Esben Willems from Monolord and one with Doug Sherman from Gozu. These are two gentlemen whose company I very much enjoy, so as I haven’t really habitually done interviews in like three years, I wanted to start out as much in my comfort zone as I could. I think I’m not going to post the videos. That’s right, y’all. Text interviews. Remember those?
This weekend is Cosmic Sonic Rendezvous — Saturday and Sunday, because it’s a holiday and nobody’s going to work Monday anyhow — and I’ll be at that if you’re going. I’ve seen the schedule and it’s a marathon and I won’t be able to see everything. I suspect some of the hard choices I’ll need to make will come down to which venue I want to be in at what time. I’ll figure it out and do the writing accordingly.
We had a meeting with The Pecan’s teacher and case manager yesterday. She’s doing alright in the fourth grade math class, still kind of losing it every now and then but basically alright in the room, which is huge. She had a test yesterday. Her last one she got a B, which was like culture-shock for the kid who didn’t get a problem wrong between kindergarten and this year in second grade. Multi-step directions kill her. That’s an ADHD thing too. We also heard a bit more about her reading/writing, which she tested at grade level for before the school year started but her teacher puts her at the end of third grade in terms of the skills she’s willing to demonstrate now (always a question what you’ll actually get out of her in a given scenario; she’s not there to perform for your ass, whether you’re grading her or not), and that felt really good to hear. We’re still pursuing the other school, but in the meantime, I’m glad her days aren’t as miserable as they seem to have been a year ago this time.
Zelda update. I finished the Ship of Harkinian PC port of Ocarina of Time, and it was incredible. The best time I’ve had playing the game since I was in high school, and if and when I’m looking to play it again, that’s what I’ll reach for. It was so fun I got all 100 of the gold skulltula tokens. I’ve started a run through Twilight Princess, which is something of a spiritual successor/sequel anyhow and also just released a PC port called Dusklight. It’s definitely ‘earlier-version,’ if you know what I mean — like, might break at a moment’s notice — but it looks gorgeous and plays well anyhow and I’m through the Forest Temple so will probably keep that going unless I run into some serious technical snag. I still haven’t done the withered tree quest in Wind Waker. Saving it for a special occasion.
That’s the update.
If you’re in NYC at Cosmic Sonic Rendezvous this weekend, awesome, I’ll hope to say hi. Hope you have a great and safe one, whatever else might be on tap. Don’t forget to hydrate and don’t forget to say fuck fascism every chance you get lest these fascists think their behavior remotely acceptable on any human level. Always remember you are better.
Is it too soon to talk about The Return of Tomorrow (review here) in hindsight? Probably. The album turns two next month (it was released June 14, 2024). Two years is a long time in pop, but in heavy rock circles it might as well have been on Wednesday. They’re still touring for it, though really it’s not like the San Clemente four-piece whose journey we’ve now charted from about 41 years ago to now need an excuse to get on the road. But you understand what I’m saying. This album remains their latest, and of course, as always, I stand by the review. I’ll do my best to retread it as little as possible, but if I make the same point over again — “duh, Fu Manchu are heavy and fuzzy,” or somesuch landmark insight — I beg your forgiveness.
In the context of the band’s discography, one might count The Return of Tomorrow as album number 13. The staggered release of the three Fu30 EPs (discussed here) between 2020 and 2023 assured that as dark as times got, the band was never completely absent, and about as soon as they could get back on the road, as I recall, that’s what they did.
That said, The Return of Tomorrow was a breath of fresh Fu in the six-year LP dearth since 2018’s Clone of the Universe (discussed here, review here), and it revealed a new trajectory for the course the San Clemente four-piece — the continuing lineup of founding guitarist/vocalist Scott Hill, bassist/sometimes-backing-vocalist Brad Davis, lead guitarist Bob Balch and drummer Scott Reeder; the latter three of whom by this point were awash in solo/side/other projects — that began a decade earlier with 2014’s Gigantoid (discussed here, review here), departing somewhat from the rolling largesse of the prior 2009 outing, Signs of Infinite Power (discussed here), and finding a production style able to speak to the multiple facets in their sound between punk, heavy metal and the riff-led shove-‘n’-groove they themselves helped pioneer.
The Return of Tomorrow is on the longer end of Fu Manchu records at 49:12. It’s second only to 1997’s The Action is Go (discussed here) in runtime, which clocked in at a peak-CD-era 55 minutes, aided in part by the lengthy “Saturn III” and a good bit of silence. The Return of Tomorrow, however, uses all of its time, and in a way that the band never had before, with a stated intent toward 2LP experience.
So, in that regard, it’s actually short. The way Hill explained the structure of the album in the advance promo was as follows:
When I listen to music, it’s either all heavy stuff with no mellow stuff mixed in or just softer stuff with no heavy stuff. I know a lot of bands like to mix it up and we have done that before, but I always tend to listen to all of one type of thing or the other. So, I figured we should do a double-record with seven heavy fuzzy songs on one record and the other record six mellow(er) songs, fully realizing that maybe I’m the only person that likes to listen to stuff that way.
We kept both the records to around 25-30 minutes each as to make it a full-length release, but not have each record be too long. We don’t write a lot of mellow(er) stuff in Fu Manchu, but a lot of the riffs worked minus the fuzz. If you’re a vinyl person, both records are pressed at 45rpm to give it the best sound quality. If you’re a digital person, can make your own playlist and mix both the records together.
This quote is especially telling in light of what I’ll call the most overlooked aspect of The Return of Tomorrow — at least by me; I don’t read anybody else’s reviews — which is the flexibility of approach. The emergent willingness in the band to mess around with their own forms, structures and processes. “Lifetime Waiting” opens that ‘mellower’ second mini-LP and you wouldn’t say it’s not heavy, but there is absolutely a shift in intent from “Loch Ness Wrecking Machine,” or “Dehumanize” at the outset, or even the slower but still brash “Haze the Hides” earlier on. “Solar Baptized” and “What I Need” bring psychedelic flourish and continued drawl.
The title-track appears in the latter section, ahead of the signature start-stoppage in “Liquify” and quiet, brief jam-out in “High Tide” that finishes the collection. Unless, of course, it doesn’t, because even Hill notes that for someone listening on a digital format, if they want to they can move the songs around however they like to change their own experience.
Understand for a second what that really says. Here’s someone who’s been playing in bands for over 40 years, and who has been instrumental in developing one of the most recognizable sounds in the six-plus decade history of heavy rock and roll. There is no other Fu Manchu and there never has been, and at least going by outward appearances, I don’t think anything happens in the band without Hill‘s ultimate approval. And what he’s telling you is the order doesn’t matter. 30 years on from their first record, with a string of classics along the way, where Fu Manchu arrived was like this third-eye-open album presentation. Make it what you want, if you want. How many artists exhibit that kind of flexibility, at any point, ever, let alone after so many years of steering their own creations?
Next week I’m wrapping up this Fu Manchu catalog series, as we’ll be caught up from the beginning to now, so I’ll save any conclusions or extrapolated life-lessons for that, but what The Return of Tomorrow most emphasizes to me specifically is the undervalued creativity and dynamic in the band. Part of that stems from having such a defined sound, but while they were not engaging any radical aesthetic changes in these 13 songs, they nonetheless offered them to their listenership in a way they never had before and made something new from them as well as within them. I don’t know of another outfit who could’ve done the same thing and pulled it off so well.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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Next week: Quarterly Review. You tell The Patient Mrs. so I don’t have to.
It’s the week I have, so I’m going with it. There won’t be much else posted, and again, we close out the Fu Manchu catalog series next week with the live album that followed this studio release. I didn’t get to review it last year when it came out, so I’m looking forward to engaging with it. After that I’ll probably do Claypool Lennon Delirium or Nine Inch Noize. I’ve got a backlog of Friday Full-Lengths at this point before I think about another discography. Though, to that: Acid King? Orange Goblin? Thinking about that too, I suppose.
Before I go further I want to wish the very best to T.R. Morton of Freedom Hawk, who revealed this week his pancreatic cancer diagnosis as the band canceled their appearance at next week’s Cosmic Sonic Rendezvous in NYC, where I was looking forward to seeing them again. I hope to see him back onstage having freshly kicked cancer’s ass as soon as humanly possible, and in the meantime, send strength and love to help him get there and encourage you reading this to do the same.
The Patient Mrs.’ mother, whom I love dearly, came down yesterday to facilitate some backyard planting, which they did this morning while I worked on the above. We also last night had my family over to celebrate one of my oldest nephew’s friend’s birthdays — I was outside with The Pecan and my cousin playing wiffe ball for most of it, when I wasn’t picking up the food — and so that was busy. I don’t know if the kid enjoyed himself or not, but I said happy birthday anyhow and got stared at weirdly by teenagers. Like why would you even?
This weekend is Desertfest London and Berlin. Having been at Oslo last weekend, I’m jealous of those partying down in either city. Oslo was amazing, a killer trip. I was tired coming back, but I recovered a bit this week and feel good about how it all went down. I’m looking forward to Freak Valley in a few weeks.
Zelda update: I did the Water Temple in the ‘Ship of Harkinian’ PC port of Ocarina of Time the other evening. It took the entire evening. And I was using a walkthrough, albeit in stonerly fashion. The Pecan wants to do Bottom of the Well, so I might let her handle that after she gets home from Girl Scouts. Her mom is out for a bit anyhow, I think. I don’t know if she wants to do the Spirit Temple or not. But that’s where I’m at with that.
I came pretty close to 100-percenting Echoes of Wisdom, which is low-key and unabashed fun, low intensity in a way I very much enjoy, and I did play a bit of Tears of the Kingdom on the plane on the way to Norway, though not as much as I’d have liked because I didn’t have a plug under the seat. I also this week downloaded the Dusk or Dusklight as I’m seeing it called fan port of Twilight Princess, and I might try to play through that next.
I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Thank you for reading and for keeping up with the site however much you do. Fuck fascism, capitalism and white supremacy forever and ever and ever.
Like everybody’s everything, Fu Manchu‘s 2020 didn’t go as planned. A 30th anniversary celebration that as I recall was going to bring the three 10″ EPs above in the span of the year itself, plus touring, hit against a global lockdown and universal delays. Fu30 turned out to be a longer celebration, spread across three years as April 2020’s Fu30, Pt. 1 would be followed in April 2022 by Fu30, Pt. 2 and in Feb. 2023 by Fu30, Pt. 3, each with three songs, one of them a cover, and artwork referencing that same cover.
As was likely the plan all along, the three three-songers were compiled onto a single LP/CD, Fu30 Volumes I-III (the cover referencing KISS‘ Double Platinum), in 2023, and the band’s cover of Rush‘s “Working Man,” which they issued as a standalone in 2020 in homage to Rush drummer Neil Peart. The 10-song collection reshuffled the tracklisting as well, mixing the originals in such a way that Fu30, Pt. 2 leadoff “Strange Plan” fronts side A. I’ll be digging into this version. It’s here if you’re interested in following along that way:
Either way you go, Fu Manchu were clearly celebrating the three decades of their tenure by doing what they do best, which is being Fu Manchu. “Strange Plan” as a bit of characteristic lurch but breaks out for its solo, and it’s immediately backed by “Takin’ It to the Streets,” originally by The Doobie Brothers, which is likewise slowed down. The rhythm of the chorus is accordingly a little awkward, and among Fu Manchu ’70s covers, you’d be hard pressed to find one that fits better than “Godzilla,” but “Takin’ It to the Streets” gets bonus points for messing with the original a bit and the dirtied-up, riffier ending.
The other two covers — Surf Punks‘ “My Wave” from Fu30, Pt. 2, and Plimsouls‘ “A Million Miles Away” with Neil Fallon of Clutch on guest vocals — are spread throughout. The hairier fuzz at the finish of “Takin’ It to the Streets” continues as a theme into the shorter and speedier “As You Crawl,” and the momentum they amass there carries into the more open, drum-led verses of “Orb,” which is a highlight, with its stops and starts and weighted, on-the-beat, but still not overly aggressive approach. “My Wave” follows and also gets the start-stop treatment, offset with some effects and broader fuzz.
Producer Jim Monroe, who mixed 2014’s Gigantoid (discussed here, review here) before stepping into full-on helming a Fu Manchu LP recording on 2018’s Clone of the Universe (discussed here, review here), seems to have recorded all the tracks across the three LPs, and indeed, the sound of “Orb” or “My Wave” carries on that place-between sensibility of latter-day, post-2014 Fu, with a style that can speak both to the heavier onslaught of their two late-aughts full-lengths and the punk foundations of their ’90s heyday. Fu30, Volumes I-III obviously wasn’t written to be an album, and it’s not an album, but with so much groove around and an aesthetic that’s been defining itself over the course of — wouldn’t you know it — 30 years, continuity feels inevitable.
And that’s ultimately why I went with the compilation version rather than approaching the three EPs separately here. It’s perhaps a little truer to what Fu Manchu‘s intention for their 30th anniversary might’ve been, and it’s a decent LP-style flow across the two sides, splitting after “My Wave” to open side B with “A Million Miles Away” and Fallon‘s guest appearance, which feels a bit like an event even though the Clutch frontman and Fu Manchu bassist Brad Davis worked together in The Company Band (that felt like an event too), and whether you’re familiar with the original or not — which is my way of telling you I’m not — it makes a rocking start to the second half of the tracklisting.
The three Fu Manchu originals that follow — “Time is Going On,” “Low Road” and “Over Blower” — are culled in succession, one each, from the three EPs, and they represent the longest stretch of the band’s own songs on Fu30, Volumes I-III. All three use start-stop riffing in a different way and to a different atmospheric end. “Time is Going On” is quintessential mid-paced Fu. It could be on any number of records and because we’re talking about context we are, that’s a compliment. “Low Road” lightens up on impact a bit with a bluesier swing and lead licks, which of course makes the roller sensibilities of “Over Blower” seem to land that much heavier in comparison. But the three make a convenient sampling, because between them there aren’t any massive changes in basic approach, and yet Fu Manchu are able to affect a diversity of moods and atmospheres with subtle shifts in tone or tempo.
This is, of course, invariably, part of what has allowed them both their longevity and their position among the foremost US heavy rock bands of their generation, but it boils down to songwriting and that was never in doubt going in. If anything, Fu30, Volume I-III is a fan-piece, and Fu fans are probably those who need least to be convinced of the band’s prowess in this regard. Still, as both an occasion worth celebrating and a collection of Fu Manchu songs (plus covers) pressed to whatever size plastic circle one might prefer, you won’t find me arguing against whatever aspects here might be preaching to the choir. That’s kind of the whole idea.
Fu Manchu‘s anniversary touring would eventually happen, and as they’re now past their 35th anniversary, the concerns around the 30th are a thing of the past. This collection still remains, however, and as they might look ahead to the next decade milestone on their path, one can only wonder what might be in store for that and, of course, hope there are no plagues to derail.
To end honestly, I’ll tell you that I was thinking of skipping this one altogether. It’s not really an album, and it’s not as widely regarded in Fu Manchu‘s catalog as, say, the LP-from-EPs compilation Godzilla’s Eatin’ Dust (discussed here). But if you’ve been following the march of time through this series, you know we’re getting pretty close to now, and as I look ahead to what’s left, I found myself wanting to fit in as much as possible before it was finished. This is the 16th Friday Full-Length in a raw that’s been Fu Manchu. How many bands, really, would still have you trying to cram more in after so long?
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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Hang on, gonna go take the dog around the block with The Patient Mrs.
…That was the right idea. I feel like I haven’t moved my body in months because, mostly, I haven’t. Oddly enough, neither Hungarian homework nor stonerblogging are particularly onerus physically. Strange how I hate exercising and I seem to have structured my entire life around not. I can still suplex The Pecan if I need to.
Speaking of The Pecan, we have a meeting today at 2PM about her being in fourth grade math. Like a check-in, except that in the interim this week the district announced they’re moving her class to a different school, so basically we’re done with them and it’s time to get the ball rolling on out of district placement. They’re removing her from her ‘home’ school cohort anyway and her current placement doesn’t seem to be educating her so much as enforcing compliance, so if they’re going to make the environment even more restrictive by taking her away from the kids she’s been in class with the last three years, they don’t really have a leg to stand on in keeping her in that program at all.
My sincere hope is that’s a good thing in the long run, but it sure sucks now. The convenience of the neighborhood school — especially if it’s a decent one, which we’re privileged to live near — isn’t to be understated. Leaving that to potentially drive half an hour to and from Berkeley Heights each day isn’t something I relish, especially if I come home in between, but if that’s what the thing is gonna be, then so be it. I still don’t see any way to educate this demand-avoidant, steadfast-resistance ADHD, don’t-give-a-fuck-about-the-rules autistic kid at home. I’m neither qualified nor inclined to do it — and yes, I’d be the one to do it — and my relationship with her has enough points of contention as regards everyday things like brushing her hair or getting dressed for school. Am I really supposed to expect her to learn about social studies from me? I can’t even convince her not to pee all over the toilet seat.
That puts a lot of stakes on the private school we’ve been in touch with. We have a meeting with them next week, but I think the outcome of today is just going to be stay the course with the math unless and until the wheels come off, then pivot to something else, which has been ‘the plan’ all along. One band-aid into another, since kindergarten when she got to this school in the first place.
Anyway. Feeling anxious for one meeting, will feel anxious for the next, and probably the 75 after that before we get anything accomplished and hopefully get her on the road to where she needs to be educationally.
I took her last week for an evaluation at Mathnasium. They do a free whathaveyou and then tell you the price of tutoring, which is prohibitive enough in a group setting, let alone for a private tutor which she’d probably need. Like the school, they had her somewhere in the fourth grade range, but the woman who gave us the tour was watching her do the math in her head and we talked about how she’s always just been able to see it, and in the follow-up email, the woman said she could see The Pecan was gifted. It sucks that something as stupid and made up as money is the barrier to her pursuing her passion for math in that setting. It seems so vulgar an idea.
That’s the kid update, who’s up for a Zelda update?
I got to watch The Patient Mrs. play about an hour of a Breath of the Wild game she’s had going for a while on the Switch 2. She never has time to play because, well, she has way more of a real life than I do, what with the success in her career, friends, online support groups and international union of moms worldwide. She took on the Windblight Ganon rematch and used like 80 arrows. It was fun. I still think I’d have a hard time getting into a replay of BOTW, but it is beautiful.
Meantime, a bit in anticipation for the fan-made PC ports of Twilight Princess that I mentioned last week, I downloaded Ship of Harkinian, which is the decompiled version of Ocarina of Time with a wide slew of cheats, mods and quality-of-life changes built-in. There’s a button you click that’s like, ‘Hey do you wanna use 4K textures now?’ and you click yes and then it works. Part of what I was curious about with the native PC version instead of running it on an N64 emulator was what the difference was. The difference is how well everything functions.
The Pecan saw me starting the game yesterday evening and took over, played through the first dungeon and on toward the next by bedtime, most of the time sitting on my lap. Total win for nerd parenting. Highlight of my month, definitely as far as hanging out with her is concerned.
I also put a couple hours this week into the Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake, which is a game I played like 35-plus years ago on the NES made from the ground up with new grpahics and gameplay and such. It’s fun. My rotted-brain attention span is challenged by turn-based battling, which 10-year-old me would neither understand nor accept, but it’s still fun and if I play it for like an hour or two at a time over the course of the next however long, passively, once in a while, well then I got to enjoy it for longer. /end Zelda update.
Premieres next week slated for The Dharma Chain, Her Name Was Fire and November Fire, and then I’m out to cover Desertfest Oslo, which doesn’t feel real even a little bit yet and probably won’t until I’m sitting in the airport waiting to roll out. Last year was a joy, though, and I’m looking forward to getting back. The more I see of that city, the more I like it.
Have a great and safe weekend. Don’t forget to hydrate. And fuck the supreme court and whoever decided that guy who burnt down the warehouse — Mr. Theyshouldajustpaidusalivingwageorwhateverhesaid — was a terrorist.
Gotta respect the outlier. The weird one. In a discography that as of this writing holds no fewer than 12 albums, this being number 11, Clone of the Universe is something of an outlier. Released Feb. 9, 2018, through the band’s At the Dojo Records imprint — the second self-release behind 2014’s Gigantoid (discussed here, review here) — it’s probably best known as the one that has Alex Lifeson from Rush on it, and fair enough.
For the band, that seemed to be a focal point by which I mean probably something of a life-event on a personal level. I won’t claim to be a huge Rush fan in no small part because I know people who are and I’ve seen the passion they inspire, but “Il Mostro Atomico,” the almost but not entirely instrumental 18-minute multi-movement epic-o’-riff that Fu Manchu and Lifeson conjure to close out the album and consume all of its B-side, is unlike anything else the Fu had done before or have done since.
It completely changes the structure of the LP, and it throws a wrench in what, certainly by 2018, was a pretty vivid expectation on the part of listeners. That is to say, generally speaking — and indeed for the first half of Clone of the Universe as well — Fu Manchu aren’t trying to be tricky and they don’t need to be. Their songs can come right at you, like “Intelligent Worship” and “(I’ve Been) Hexed” do here. “Don’t Panic” is a punker’s gallop and it’s paired with “Slower Than Light,” with its languid-till-it-very-much-isn’t flow. The way Clone of the Universe plays out, it’s almost like two EPs put together — you’ll recall Fu Manchu did that 19 years earlier with Godzilla’s Eatin’ Dust (discussed here) — and the story of the record is invariably “Il Mostro Atomico,” the great standout, but across the six songs they pack onto side A, it’s some of the band’s most efficient songwriting to-date.
I don’t know which was recorded first, between “Il Mostro Atomico” and the first half of the 36-minute LP before it, but if you told me that the atomic monster was tracked before anything else and that the band were then tasked with packing an album’s worth of Fu Manchu into, well, about 18 minutes, the way the material from “Intelligent Worship” to the title-track works makes that seem like not a crazy read. Each of the first six songs — and certainly the seventh as well, but I’m just talking about the shorter cuts for now — offers something distinct from the others, or does something in a different way. In tone, the vocals of founding guitarist Scott Hill — the established lineup of Hill, guitarist Bob Balch, bassist Brad Davis and drummer Scott Reeder remains here; Jim Monroe engineered/co-produced (he mixed/did additional recording on Gigantoid), while Andrew Giacumakis (who helmed Gigantoid) mixed and recorded some of the bass and drums — and the prevalence of hooks, Clone of the Universe doesn’t want for consistency, but each song is hitting its own marks.
“Intelligent Worship” is uptempo, but not a rush, has a characteristic start-stop riff and is the first in a succession of earworms. Business as usual for Fu Manchu? To an extent, yes, but the fuzz throughout Clone of the Universe retains some of the gnarlier edge that Gigantoid brought to it after the largesse of their two Century Media releases, and “Intelligent Worship” puts the focus early on the energy of their delivery, which at this point had already been among the band’s primary strengths for 28 years. The way “(I’ve Been) Hexed” answers by opening wider in its chorus feels also like it’s speaking a bit to the more confrontational sound of 2009’s Signs of Infinite Power (discussed here), which is something that Reeder as the last piece slotted into place in this lineup definitely bolstered.
The already noted charge of “Don’t Panic” — all of two minutes long and your diligent reminder this is a punk band — and the subsequent mellowing of “Slower Than Light” follow, one into the next. It’s about as back-and-forth as Clone of the Universe gets, since that isn’t really how the album works or seems to want to work, but it’s invariably also a ready example of their dynamic. “Nowhere Left to Hide,” the longest song on side A at 4:18, follows and contrasts a quiet verse with the hardest-landing stomp of a chorus and a slower roll marked by the drum fills and the solo at the finish, coming back to ground for the start-stop immediately-dug-in feel of the title-track.
“Clone of the Universe” feels like quintessential Fu Manchu for most of its sub-three-minute run, but they blow it out in the second half and Balch shreds it to pieces as he will before they hit the slowdown and hard stop. But in terms of sonic identity, there’s no chance you’re listening to anybody else when that song is on. The stage is set, then, by this we-compressed-an-LP’s-worth-of-Fu–Manchu-into-18-minutes, for “Il Mostro Atomico,” which plays out across multiple movements and is dug in in an entirely different way to any other piece in the band’s discography to this point, not departing a verse/chorus for a jam, but setting itself to an instrumentalist sprawl and including vocals in what was almost certainly a later addition to its midsection.
There isn’t another Fu Manchu song like it, and sure enough, it’s an epic worthy of the experience of its making. Lifeson‘s guitar effects course through, intermingling with Balch and Hill‘s progressions, and honestly, it’s about as far away from what you’d expect on a Fu Manchu record and still have it be them, so as it happened on their 11th record which came out, as noted, 28 years into their tenure, it feels like an even more admirable realization for the decision that it was time to start experimenting with the formula.
Could “Il Mostro Atomico” have been released on its own? Yes, but not putting it on an LP would almost feel like a waste in terms of preserving it, and Fu Manchu shine over the course of a full-length, regardless of its construction. Clone of the Universe is a singular moment for them, and for its aspects familiar and not, a landmark in their catalog.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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Man, last weekend being Roadburn was kind of sad, mostly because I wasn’t there. If you were, I hope it was cool.
Let’s see, what’s up this week. The world remains a roiling genocidal shitshow operating at the questionable financial benefit of madmen. The Patient Mrs. booked my flights for Desertfest Oslo and Freak Valley. Unless an invite comes in for the Fall — there’s a fest in Hungary I’m co-presenting in September that I’d love to go to, or Ripplefest Texas, but neither of those is good timing, plus money is impossible and I don’t think either of them has any interest in flying me out — it’ll be those, Tee Pee’s Cosmic Sonic Rendezvous in NYC and later this year the …In the Key of Doom that Gav’s Heavily Curated is doing in Brooklyn. I’d like to do Emissions From the Monolith, but gas, time, and money. So I’m looking forward to getting out where and when I can.
They put The Pecan in fourth grade math starting this week. She’s in second grade, but they tested her as part of our constant bitching that she’s not being academically challenged and found that, indeed, she’s way ahead second grade in terms of what she knows. So she’s been going to the new class, which she is smart enough to know makes her smart but still eight years old enough to feel like a big deal about it. Most of her arrogance is boasting to mask anxiety — where on earth did she get that from? — but it’s nice to see her excel and feel good about it. She’s got enough bullshit on her plate any given day just being told to sit in her chair for six hours. Which, when you think about it, kind of seems like torture, whether you love learning or not.
She had her first test, which we’re kind of figuring she might’ve bungled because she’d only been in the class for three days, but hopefully she gets that back today. She said she thought she got 100, but you know, reading multiple-step directions has been a challenge before, and fourth grade is likely a more complex kind of questioning than she’s used to, so we’ll see. She blew up apparently when she walked into the room and there were partitions on the desks. “First I’m hearing of all this,” seemed to be her take as regards having the test.
Speaking of (there was a reference if you didn’t catch it), she’s also been revisiting Bluey the last couple days during tv time. No regrets there. That and Peep and the Big Wide World I think are my favorites. Of course Sesame Street.
Next week, I’m going to review the Slomosa live album, Live in Bergen, which is out for Record Store Day. I have an Iron Jinn premiere slated for next Thursday, but the week otherwise is kind of light, so I’m looking at May releases to hopefully start digging into. I’ve got a Quarterly Review to slate for May, as well as Desertfest Oslo to consider, so I need to look at the calendar generally and figure out where I’m at. Will I do that this weekend? I promise you, your guess is as good as mine.
Zelda update? Yes. I beat Echoes of Wisdom again, which is so cozy and fun that I even went through and got the heart pieces from the minigames, and I frickin’ hate minigames. I haven’t 100 percented it, and I’m not sure if I will — there are more heart pieces and might crystals I need and I’m not sure where to find them — but I got all the echoes and did some side quests I hadn’t done before, and I like it a lot. Maybe my favorite 2D Zelda, but don’t tell me that while I’m playing A Link to the Past. My laptop was on the fritz and I lost the ability to change a bunch of display settings, so I took three hours Monday and, by dumb luck, managed to fix it. I celebrated by doing the trading quest in The Wind Waker in that same modded game on the emulator. I still have the withered deku tree quest I can do, but I’m saving it for a special occasion/when I feel like it as well.
I’ve also resigned myself to at some point playing through Twilight Princess again — but it’s so long — but there’s an unofficial PC port in the works (actually two of them, Dusk and Courage Reborn; these are the result of decompilation efforts; see also Ship of Harkinian as relates to Ocarina of Time), so I think I’m going to wait for that and see how it runs because when I ran it through Dolphin (the emulator) last time it was pretty laggy. I also last night as The Patient Mrs. was doing bedtime put on Tears of the Kingdom for a few, did a couple shrines, a couple sidequests, explored a well I hadn’t been in yet, some wanton bokoblin slaughter, etc., all in the modded game.
I can see myself returning to that game again and again, vanilla or modded, over the next years, even more than Breath of the Wild. There’s so much you can do in that sandbox. Though I was also thinking of digging back into BOTW for a playthrough, but I honestly don’t have the kind of time to do it right and I think I’m so ingrained in TOTK that not being able to cheese those motion control shrines would destroy me. Plus I’d have to learn how to parry guardian lasers and do the Trial of the Sword DLC and blah blah blah feels laborious so obviously it’s not the time for that. Plus in Breath of the Wild you can’t ride the dragons. Okay, I talked myself out of it. /end Zelda update
Thanks for indulging me. Apparently I had more to say about Zelda than I thought going in. I assure you that however tired of it you are pales in comparison to The Patient Mrs.’ level of me-fatigue.
Have a great and safe weekend — unless you’re a fascist in which case stop engaging with art because you don’t deserve it in your life — and don’t forget to hydrate. I think The Patient Mrs. is going to a conference in Burlington, Vermont, tonight, but we need to figure out how she’s getting there; we’re down a car with one in the shop. I also need to hit the weed store. Either way, I’m back Monday with hopefully that Slomosa review and more good stuff besides and will be around this weekend to try to do some emails and get stuff ready for the week if you need me.
The five years between 2009’s Signs of Infinite Power (discussed here) and 2014’s Gigantoid (review here) was at that point the longest studio drought of Fu Manchu‘s career. They didn’t break up or anything, but they toured and toured and toured, doing whole album celebrations of 1996’s In Search Of… (discussed here) and 1997’s The Action is Go (discussed here) on US and European runs that, yeah, were something of a victory lap, but also assured Fu Manchu could and were ready to deliver even if not yet on a new album. To put it to scale, the band released five LPs between 1994-1999, and that doesn’t count compiling two EPs into the full-length Godzilla’s Eatin’ Dust (discussed here) in 1998. Five years can make a big difference in the life of a band.
In 2014, Fu Manchu were embarking on self-releasing a new album for the first time, and in some ways, the story of Gigantoid is the story of the band being able to cement themselves as a DIY operation, balancing operating costs and creative endeavors, handling the logistics of promotion and releasing in-house. Fortunately Gigantoid was greeted with anticipation. It was the first Fu Manchu offering to come out during the mobile/social media era, and resonated with a new generation of fans accordingly. I don’t have numbers to back the assertion that for many it was probably their first Fu record, but even without the data point citations, I was there to see it happen, and Fu Manchu would benefit from the reborn word of mouth that dude-check-out-this-video direct sharing would allow, let alone the birth of podcasts, shitheel blogs and so on. The landscape had changed, and removing themselves from the traditional label model and finding that they could be sustainable — whole album tours are usually a crowdpleaser — must have made it an even more exciting time.
The band had just come through releasing two albums through (Century Media imprint) Liquor and Poker Music and then Century Media-proper in 2007’s We Must Obey (discussed here) and the aforementioned Signs of Infinite Power, and in them had incarnated the most aggressive take since Scott Hill was playing guitar in Virulence during Fu Manchu‘s formative hardcore punk days. Gigantoid represents another partial departure in their methodology. The tonal largesse of We Must Obey had carried somewhat into Signs of Infinite Power, and as “Dimension Shifter” gets underway on Gigantoid, that hard-on-the-beat sensibility isn’t completely absent, but the band — the established lineup of Hill (guitar/vocals), Bob Balch (lead guitar), Brad Davis (bass) and Scott Reeder (drums) — very pointedly go somewhere else, diverging after the first two minutes into a mellower slowdown as a setup for Balch‘s solo, leading into a further spaceout slow-roll from whence the fuzz riff picks up at the start of “Invaders on My Back,” soon joined by a rush of bass and drums.
Momentum is still very much a factor, but the band’s punk elements were sneaking back into the sound, and amid signature hooks, songs like “Invaders on My Back,” “Radio Source Sagittarius” and the later if-you’re-looking-for-largesse-here-it-is roll of “Evolution Machine” revel in it, let alone the actual punker tracks like “No Warning” or “Triplanetary,” both of which offset the broader-reaching fare on side B; Gigantoid very much playing out as two sides with individual purposes between them nonetheless fluid front-to-back as they maybe invariably would be when so much groove abounds. But prior to that redirect, side A unfurls a no-filler tour de force of Fu Manchu‘s songwriting at its any-era finest, “Dimension Shifter” leading the listener into its comedown as a setup for “Invaders on My Back,” emphasizing tempo malleability while staying straightforward and sans-presense in intent. “Anxiety Reducer,” which I think is about both floating uncontrollably in space Major Tom-style and weed, packs another wallop of a chorus and feels all the more made for the stage when they bring it to a big rock and roll crashout at the end, well enough by then earned, what with all the rocking.
“Radio Source Sagittarius” was my pick up of the bunch when Gigantoid came out, and its chorus remains choice; “Eyes wide on arrival/Got ’em running high and low…” and so on. It is exceedingly well placed as an apex for side A. It doesn’t actually finish the album’s first half — that task falls to the heavier and more lumbering but two-minute post-actual-hardcore riff setpiece “Mutant” — but it is a landmark just the same and a defining moment for Fu Manchu circa 2014. The fact that “Mutant” is shorter also smooths the transition into “No Warning,” which is all of 1:25 and sets up a direct contrast with the rollout of “Evolution Machine,” laying out a back and forth that continues into the final two tracks, “Triplanetary” and the near-eight-minute closer “The Last Question.”
On some level, that back and forth is a conversation that’s happening between songs all along, but it is starkest as they push through “Triplanetary,” which would love to hang out and chat but just doesn’t have the time, and “The Last Question,” which does have the time and takes it, answering the jammier side of “Dimension Shifter” with the goes-wandering-and-doesn’t-come-back psych exploration that begins even before its first half is done. As in the opener, as they round out, Fu Manchu are able to meander in ways their songwriting generally doesn’t have much interest in being. Neither “The Last Question” nor “Dimension Shifter” is the band’s first foray into jamming, but it’s something they don’t always do on a given record and it was a side of their sound that on Gigantoid was particularly served by the production and mix by Moab‘s Andrew Giacumakis.
The way Gigantoid balances fullness of tone, clarity and raw performance vitality is a standout against whatever you’d want to put it next to in Fu Manchu‘s catalog. With five years’ separation from what came before it, it felt like the beginning of a new era for the band, and in the 12 years since, it has kind of turned out to be just that; a low-key highlight of the discography that, whether you were there in the ’90s or not, is ready to welcome aboard listeners from across generations.
As always, I hope you enjoy.
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This week was a lot. Túl sok, I might tell my Hungarian teacher. Wednesday night we went to a hockey game for the New York Sirens, which is the plays-in-Newark team for the PWHL, the Professional Women’s Hockey League. It was The Pecan’s first evening game, and it was the Pride game — I guess because they don’t play hockey in June, they did it in April — which was the first game we went to last year, so way fun. They were losing when we left but came back to win. Fair enough. The Pecan made it till about 9PM and then was crazypants and ready to go. We had open seats on either side of us and front and back, so she had room to dance and wiggle and get on the jumbotron like four times with a sign she poured her heart into making and came out pretty well — she’s always been able to draw and never does; if I could draw I would never stop, the way I never stop writing — but it was recognizable when she was done and it was time to leave.
Yesterday there was a phone call and a low-key meeting at school, Hungarian was Monday, Tuesday and Friday instead of Tuesday, Tuesday and Thursday, my sister bought a car and there just wasn’t a lot of letup. Monday night The Patient Mrs. was out to dinner, or a meeting or I don’t know what, and The Pecan’s OT is Monday and Thursday, so it was just bang-bang-bang all week. This weekend she’s got a birthday party (I’m not going) and archery, and then we go right into next week for more of I don’t even know what leading to another booked out weekend next weekend. And so on into where-did-the-years-go perpetuity.
You might’ve noticed yesterday and today, not a ton of posts. That’s me actively choosing quality over quantity. I did three full reviews this week, for Kal-El, C.O.C. and Truckfighters, as well as an album premiere for Occult Hand Order and a video premiere for Slow Draw that had a whole album review with it, so that’s five reviews Monday to Friday, which felt both oldschool and pretty awesome in terms of productivity. I did not feel like those hours would have been better spent chasing down some filler news story. I was quite pleased to get those reviews done.
Next week, uh… well, I was gonna go to Hopsmoker in Massachusetts OR Grim Reefer Fest in Baltimore, but money’s pretty tight, so I think neither is happening. Plenty of writing to do here, I suppose.
Zelda update: I don’t know where I last left off, but I beat Wind Waker like a week and a half ago maybe and started a game of Echoes of Wisdom, which I like a lot. Playing as Zelda instead of Link is fun, and the way the combat works where you have to generate monsters to fight for you is fun, less Pokemon than it sounds on paper but still of that ilk, I guess, in a Zelda-y way. I’m not using a guide or anything, like the last run through Wind Waker, just kind of playing to enjoy it. Been a couple weeks since I touched Tears of the Kingdom, but I know it’s still there and that’s fine.
Oh, and we went last weekend, maybe last Sunday, to see the Mario Galaxy movie. I was good and stoned and I feel like that was every bit the way to experience it. If you go, I don’t recommend lucidity.
I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Have fun, find solace amid the horrors. I’m checking out the Nine Inch Noize record today, might close a week with it at some point. Whatever you’re up to, enjoy, unless you’re a nazi, in which case you can fuck yourself off the side of a cliff to make the world a better place. I’m back Monday with more shenanigans and a review of something or other.
FRM. Anybody want a shirt that says ‘riffs against fascism?’
It might not be improper to think of Signs of Infinite Power as a sequel to 2007’s We Must Obey (discussed here), seeing as how the lineup is consistent, two records comprise the entirety of the band’s Century Media era and are distinct from the rest of their catalog for the more aggressive side of their sound captured by producer Sergio Chavez, while Andrew Alekel (who produced the album before) mixed. Signs of Infinite Power, which was released on Oct. 20, 2009 — it was covered here when this site was just a little baby obbylisk; barely a nubbin — doesn’t carry the same kind of tonal thickness as its predecessor, but might be meaner on balance with songs like “Steel.Beast.Defeated,” “El Busta,” “Webfoot Witch Hat,” the title-track and opener “Bionic Astronautics” setting the mood.
Of course, this is Fu Manchu‘s 10th album (depending on how you keep count), and it also marks the second time in their career they put out three full-lengths featuring the same lineup. Here, that’s founding guitarist/vocalist Scott Hill, lead guitarist Bob Balch, bassist Brad Davis and drummer Scott Reeder, the latter of whom came aboard ahead of 2003’s live album, Go for It…Live! (review here) and made his studio debut with 2004’s subsequent Start the Machine (discussed here). Signs of Infinite Power was also Fu Manchu‘s goodbye to the aughts, which as a decade weren’t as productive as the 1990s — five records between ’94-’99 and four between ’02-’09 — but featured crucial stylistic growth and were pivotal for the longterm sustainability of the band. Nailing down the personnel making the music, duh, was an essential part of this. Being on that Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 soundtrack helped too.
As the opener, “Bionic Astronautics” does a fair amount of work in telling the listener what they need to know going in. The midpoint dig-in behind the line, “You worship what you fear,” calls back to the density of the LP before, and that’s an important part of Signs of Infinite Power‘s personality — I ain’t knocking it — while finding a rawer take for their signature fuzz riffing. “Steel.Beast.Defeated” follows and is a typical rhythmic patterning, driven both for momentum coming from the leadoff and moving deeper into the record. When Fu Manchu put out The Return of Tomorrow (review here) in 2024, Hill noted the early single “Hands of the Zodiac” was lyrically inspired by an astrologer friend of long standing who apparently had a thing for saying wacky one-liners. “Steel.Beast.Defeated” and “Webfoot Witch Hat” here could have been similarly sourced, if they weren’t.
But if you’re looking for consistency among Fu Manchu‘s catalog, you don’t have to look far. In 2009, the band were 15 years removed from their debut album, and wanting neither for craft or purpose. They’d grown in some ways beyond their punk/hardcore roots, but more into their own aesthetic as a forerunner of heavy, fuzzed-out rock and roll, an alternative to the chestbeating of the heavy metal or the pop-emo that had infiltrated the punk of the time, but speaking to various sides within various genres with a solid identity conveyed through their songs. You could feasibly argue that by 1996-’97, Fu Manchu knew who they were in terms of sound and what they wanted their material to do. Skate rock for SoCal surfers. Stoner rock for an emergent next generation heavy heads. I find I’m more into Signs of Infinite Power now than when it came out. The songs have aged well and it feels liberated from expectation of what it might lead to in terms of their sound.
Because Signs of Infinite Power worked. We Must Obey worked. But taken together, the two feel like they’re pushing into a side of Fu Manchu‘s sound that they explore fully, and that of course is the aggro. They were heavy before, and they were heavy after, but they were never before or after heavy quite in the same way they were here. It’s not all furies, with slick rollers like “Eyes x 10,” or the start-stop reachout and subtle chorus melody of the penultimate “Take it Away,” but much of the funk that drummer Brant Bjork (who by this time was well into his solo career) helped bring to their sound was taken out of focus, and replaced with a more direct, on-the-beat thrust. Accordingly, amid the shred of “El Busta” and the still-hardcore two-minute closer “One Step Too Far,” a slowdown like that in “Bionic Astronautics” emphasizes that Fu Manchu, even on a mission as they seemed to be, were dynamic.
“Signs of Infinite Power” stands among the finer nods Fu Manchu have ever set forth, but as one familiar with their work would invariably expect, hooks are prevalent throughout. Some 17 years later, I’m still not sure what’s going on with “Webfoot Witch Hat” on a thematic level, but it’s memorable, and the chug and bombast of “Gargantuan March” is appreciable for being maybe as far into lumber as Fu Manchu would to-date get. They’re not a band known for extremes — that is to say they’re not an extreme heavy/metal band; their songs are accessible and they were punker kids — but Signs of Infinite Power sees them pushing themselves in what for them was still a new direction, answering the promise of We Must Obey in a manner not dissimilar from how 1997’s The Action is Go (discussed here) carried forward ideas from In Search Of… (discussed here), complementing what they’d done in the past while seeking less familiar ground.
So the last remaining question is was this really as far into charge as the band could get? By the time they were following this, the culture around heavy rock and roll — and much else — had changed owing to the increased mobilization of the internet as a means of disseminating and distributing music, and Fu Manchu would embrace a maturity that encompassed multiple facets of their style, taking their place as an influence in a word-of-mouth-fueled heavy underground. This album and this era aren’t and probably won’t ever be the band’s most widely lauded, but both on the level of the songs they were crafting and the execution they fostered during these years, it remains something special within the discography and without.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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It feels earlier than it is, coming on 11AM. That’s likely because I was out last night at that Clutch/C.O.C. show that apparently all of New Jersey decided also to hit up. Good for the bands, bad for finding a place in the venue to be. For me, anyhow. Plenty of people did just fine.
Running late means I’m on borrowed time. Coming on noon now, for example, and I know exactly where the last hour went: to the park, so The Pecan could practice riding her bike on hills. I try to remind myself that these are the actual fleeting moments, and that the writing that feels so urgent in my head and habit will still be there afterward.
Monday is a Buzzard premiere. There’s more after that but I don’t know what off the top of my head. That Kal-El review is hanging over me in a way I don’t enjoy and feel like is holding me back from other stuff, so I’m not sure what I’ll do about that, but I hope to resolve the issue by either writing about it or choosing to not by next Friday. Oh, there’s a premiere in there for Occult Hand Order from France, whose record is pretty good.
Quick Zelda update: I beat Wind Waker again. Still fun. I had mods/cheats for infinite magic, arrows and bombs, had the whole map from the start and enough hearts so that I didn’t need to do minigames or chase heart pieces I didn’t want to. A lot of that era of gaming was about prolonging the experience, and some of it’s fun and some is tedious. I really like the look, mood and controls of that game though, better than Twilight Princess, which I’ve yet to play a second time, or Ocarina of Time 3D, much as I enjoyed revisiting that. I guess I’m not a huge fan of super-long dungeons. The Twilight Princess ones were like a multi-day project. I started a new game in Echoes of Wisdom yesterday, might dig into that again because it’s fun as hell, but there are a couple in-world things I want to do in Wind Waker as well, so we’ll see what if anything next week brings.
I have homework over the weekend for Hungarian class(es) and more writing besides, so I’ll be on the laptop if you’re looking to get in touch. Unless you’re a nazi piece of shit warmongering scumbag, I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Should the caveat apply, do the world a favor and fall in a hole forever. Everyone else, thanks for reading.
Behold a record that hits hard enough it kind of feels ironic to have a soft spot for it. Fu Manchu released We Must Obey in 2007 through Liquor and Poker Music, which at the time was a Century Media imprint that also put out Nebula, The Hellacopters, Fireball Ministry and the Scott Reeder (Kyuss, The Obsessed, etc.) solo record, among others. Really, it was the first of two offerings Fu Manchu would make through Century Media, and I think if you take it on the sheer level of its tones, We Must Obey is the heaviest album Fu Manchu have released to-date.
Comprising 11 songs running 36 minutes, We Must Obey almost inevitably feels like a marked and purposeful contrast to 2004’s Start the Machine (discussed here). It was co-produced by the band and Andrew Alekel (The Company Band, Fireball Ministry, Kyng, Velvet Revolver, etc.), and for a group whose sound is so vividly realized — who have such a clear internally-defined style, who know who they are as a band and what they want to do — it is an outlier from records before and after. Since their start, and even unto the cleaner production sound of Start the Machine, and even here, Fu Manchu retained some traceable connection to their punk rock roots.
We Must Obey does this as well, but with a more aggressive take than ever before, and with a thickness of tone that, for the first time, sees the band keyed in for largesse more than movement. If that sounds like a splitting-hairs difference, I’ll argue it isn’t. “Land of Giants” has all the more stride for it, and faster pieces like “Let Me Out” and “Between the Lines” come across as more cacophonous for all the heft of distortion being thrown around in the guitars of Scott Hill and Bob Balch, as well as, crucially, Brad Davis‘ bass. Having brought on drummer Scott Reeder (not the same one; this one’s solo record as Jacket Thief came out in ’23) ahead of the LP prior, they held onto the flexibility of groove that Brant Bjork had helped bring to their sound and turned that funk into the massive nod that rounds out here in “Sensei vs. Sensei,” and the sleek roll drawn out against the push of “Lesson,” not quite as brash as the leadoff title-track — it’s not aggro or sharp-cornered enough to be metal, but neither is it far off — but groovier and offering something else.
But if you’re looking for the most consistent factor in their work — and already in 2007 they had 17 years across which to establish consistency — it’s not the fuzz or the Southern Californian skater/surfer/slacker vibing. It’s songwriting. No matter what the ultimate shape of a given album is, in terms of the recording sound or thematic intent, Fu Manchu have always been a song-based band from 1994’s No One Rides for Free (discussed here) onward, and as they hammered out over those early records both the lineup around Hill as the founding member and the parameters of their sound and aesthetic — straightforward, no pretense, not at all without a performance aspect — it was the songs that carried them through those changes, and when you think of Fu Manchu, it’s the songs you think of, whatever era of the band they might be from.
And to answer back to the opening above, I do have a soft spot for We Must Obey. I remember getting it after hearing Start the Machine and being struck by the turnaround. After what had seemed to be a more commercial turn, here came Fu Manchu and they weren’t just hitting it harder than they ever had, but doing it with a killer batch of songs one after the other: “We Must Obey” into “Knew it All Along” into “Let Me Out” into “Hung Out to Dry” into “Shake it Loose” and “Land of Giants.” That’s a side A that as far as I’m concerned stands up to anything in their catalog to which you might want to compare it, and as side B makes its way to “Sensei vs. Sensei” through “Between the Lines,” “Lesson,” the The Cars cover “Moving in Stereo” — a song made a generational landmark by Phoebe Cates’ exposure in Fast Times at Ridgemont High; very much an aesthetically suitable piece for them to take on, and a riff they make their own — and the penultimate “Didn’t Really Try,” they keep momentum as well as memorability on their side.
Being their eighth or ninth record (depending on what you count) and coming 13 years on from their first, I’m not sure it would’ve been fair to expect Fu Manchu to introduce any really radically new ideas to their sound, but within the context of what they do, We Must Obey does that anyhow. In terms of their influence, one is more likely to see records like 1996’s In Search Of… (discussed here) — they have a 30th anniversary edition coming soon — or 1997’s The Action is Go (discussed here) cited. We Must Obey feels more in league with 2000’s King of the Road (discussed here), adding charge to the deeper fuzz that LP wrought but emphasizing craft through things like subtle changes in tempo, the dynamic between Hill and Balch on guitar, and Davis‘ bass tone. It’s still very much a Fu Manchu album, but it also expanded the definition of what that means when it came out.
I’m not about picking favorites and if you’re a ’90s-epoch hyperfan, I know better than to argue. What I would advise is that if you’re going to take on We Must Obey, do it with fresh ears and a consideration for the winding path that brought Fu Manchu to that point, from hardcore punk to pioneering fuzzy roll and ever-refined processes. At the time, it showed there was still life in their riffy shove, and that reassurance shouldn’t be discounted, but in hindsight it holds up even stronger among the best of their discography. Don’t be surprised if, after making your way through it once, you don’t find yourself going back around for another go.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
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Friday. I am duly fried. I spent a decent portion of yesterday beating myself up because I didn’t end up having time to write the Kal-El review and that’s my fault anyway. I had to take my mother to the doctor, then pick up the kid. But yeah I should be able to work with both infinite time and infinite energy at the expense of the rest of my life for the tenuous reward of… this. And when I can’t, or even when I just don’t want to, that’s definitely something I should feel bad about. Also I should feel bad about when I do it, because that’s time I could probably spend cleaning the house, having a job, or failing that, being a better parent. That’s Obelisking 17 years on, for an audience that I’m pretty sure is largely imaginary.
Today begins The Pecan’s spring break — tavaszi szünet, in Hungarian, as I learned this week — and it will go through the end of next week. Accordingly, don’t be surprised if next week is one or two posts a day instead of three or four. I have some things I need to get done, but want to be around for the kid who probably will blow me off and go play with Legos anyway, as is developmentally appropriate and sad in kind, eight going on 14 as she is. The break, in any case, will be good for her.
We had a call with some of the administrator-level folks from the school district as part of our ongoing wtf-do-we-do-about-schooling-this-kid efforts. Our application for the previously discussed half-hour-away private 2E-specializing place is in, and suddenly yesterday we were pitched putting her in fourth grade math (she’s in second grade), which is where she apparantly scored on whatever assessment it was. Hilarious because when I proposed putting her even one year ahead in math last year in order to challenge her and build interest I was told flat-out “we can’t do that.” Direct quote. Start talking about making the district shell out tuition money to provide a free, fair and appropriate public education to this child and the realm of the possible seems to expand at a word. How about that.
I don’t know if we’re going to do that and I’m not sure the shiny jiggling keys of manifesting a prior desperate request will be enough to distract from the very real structural concerns at root in The Pecan’s issues in her current educational setting, between the sensory overwhelm of too-crowded classes and the sit-in-this-chair-and-pay-attention learning model in which she’s neither interested nor neurologically suited to thrive. It’s been three years of ‘let’s try this now’ flailing and as much as I relish the convenience and community engagement of having her in the local public school, I’m not willing to trade her getting the most she can out of these years and have her end up feeling like all she learned in school was how to feel bad about herself when there might be a better way to start with.
Those conversations will continue after break, presumably at some point in-person, maybe with the advocate we have kind of hanging out in our back pocket. I’ve never done this before, so I’m at something of a disadvantage as regards process.
No huge plans for next week. The Patient Mrs. has work — her spring break was a couple weeks ago; she took students to Italy and worked super-hard the whole time, thereby resulting in no break at all — so it’ll be me and the kid. I’ll wake up earlier hopefully to write. I tried to get up at 5:15 this AM and it just didn’t take. Tomorrow I’ll try for six, then 5:30, then five on Monday to get me where I want to be for a week where I’ll need all the time I can take to write because once the day starts I probably won’t get a lot of time. I don’t know that I’ll review that Kal-El, or the C.O.C., which is next on my list, or what, but I’ve got premieres set for We Follow the Earth, Hylko, Slow Draw and Prophet and Flesh, and I’m also going to see Clutch and C.O.C. at Starland Ballroom next Thursday, which will be fun and needed in kind.
Later this afternoon, we’re going to a circus that’s apparently set up in a tent in the parking lot of the Rockaway Mall, which I’m thinking will not be fun because to me the circus isn’t a good time as much as it’s like casual animal and/or human abuse and the kind of thing parents do with kids because it’s like ‘shrug are you old enough to have a human conversation yet no okay well let’s go kill time at the circus until you are.’ I’m sure there are people who actively enjoy that kind of thing, or it wouldn’t be happening — let alone happening in such an in-demand locale — and I get that the Flying Wallendas are impressive, but it’s cold, and rainy, and I’d rather not.
But you go. Because maybe the kid will have some life-epiphany or whatever and it turns out that it’s the single moment defining her in some pivotal way like the angle of the acrobat led her to discover the theory of everything and you weren’t there because you have an anxiety disorder and felt better staying home drinking seltzer and playing Zelda, so try to stave off feeling like a dipshit for the rest of your own life — which surely you’ll find some other way to do anyhow — you go to the fucking circus. Look, a clown.
I wish you a great, safe and well-hydrated weekend, whatever you’re up to. I’ll be back Monday with, I don’t know, probably more complaining. Fuck fascism. Fuck oil companies. Fuck the monsters who think raping children is a small price to pay to serve their hate. Fuck the gender binary. Fuck capitalism. Fuck every CEO. On and on. So much fucking. You’d think it would be a better time, generally.
