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. Not 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.

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The Fragile came out on Sept. 21, 1999, as the third Nine Inch Nails album. I’ve owned it since that day and just not listening to it to write this piece I managed to hear a detail of light atonal guitar strumming at 2:47 into “The Day the World Went Away” that I’ve never heard before. Following the gripping pop-industrial-metal of 1994’s The Downward Spiral, which produced hits “Closer,” “March of the Pigs” and its subdued atmospheric finale “Hurt,” was no easy task and auteur/frontman Trent Reznor managed to change the entire scale and framework through which the band functioned. The Fragile is as cinematic as it is aggressive, petulant in its emotionalism at times but ferocious in its delivery — Reznor‘s line about being “Too fucked up to care anymore” in opener “Somewhat Damaged” echoes “Nothing can stop me down ‘cuz I don’t care anymore” from the prior album’s “Piggy” — and its scope was like nothing the band had done, topping an hour and 43 minutes and comprising two individual discs, ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, and 23 songs in its original incarnation. It is the kind of record that, 21 years after the fact, one might just put it on and hear something new even after listening to it enough times that it seems to run through the body at the same speed as one’s own blood.

Like most double-albums, it has material that could be easily cut for time. Some of The Fragile‘s instrumentals and experiments — beginning with “The Frail,” “Just Like You Imagined,” “La Mer” and the militaristic “Pilgrimage” on ‘Left’ and including “The Mark Has Been Made,” “Complication” and closer “Ripe [With Decay]” on ‘Right’ — might feel superfluous to a cruel editorial process, but they nonetheless serve a function in enhancing the atmosphere and underscoring the absolute all-in nature of the album itself. The rhythmic chains in “The Fragile,” the electronic zapping noises set to the rhythm of “Into the Void,” the drone that backs “I’m Looking Forward to Joining You Finally,” and the way the twisting melody of what might otherwise be a guitar solo in “Even Deeper” so perfectly suits the jazzy beat behind it; with all of these and so, so, so many more, The Fragile becomes an album of richness and detail unmatched by anything Nine Inch Nails did before or has done since. Reznor‘s work since has developed an ambient side and continued the style of hooks one finds manifest in The Fragile cuts like “The Wretched,” “We’re in This Together Now,” “The Fragile,” “Even Deeper,” “Into the Void,” “Where is Everybody,” “Please,” “Starfuckers Inc.” and “The Big Come Down” as much as those songs continued a thread from The Downward Spiral and the prior 1992 EP, Broken, and 1989 debut, Pretty Hate Machine. But The Fragile represents an intersection between perfectionism of craft and unmitigated mania of self-indulgence. The prior album was certainly the commercial breakthrough, but it’s The Fragile where Reznor demonstrates the truest reach of his project. Every tone, every sound, every second of it is considered.

That extends even to The Fragile‘s most cringe-worthy inclusion, which is unquestionably “Starfuckers Inc.,” which seems to be Reznor doing his best impression of then protege Marilyn Manson — who as I recall appeared in the video — and even with the would-be sexually transgressive lines, “And when I suck you off not a drop will go to waste/It really isn’t so bad once you get past the taste,” doesn’t say nearly as much as the phallus-as-weapon comment on masculinity in the prior album’s “Big Man with a Gun,” but being over-the-top with teen-angst-esque lashing out against the commercial ecosystem in which the album would inevitably reside is the point. The fact that “Starfuckers Inc.,” with its signature weighted-buzzsaw guitar chug and driving chorus, is one of The Fragile‘s catchiest songs — and that’s saying something — is not happenstance either. Like everything else around it, there’s a point being made, even if it’s more rudimentary-feeling than the spaces cast forth in “The Great Below” or “The Day the World Went Away” or some of the many transitional drones and elements that bring one song into the next throughout.

Neither is “Starfuckers Inc.” the only point of immediacy on The Fragile. “No, You Don’t” picks up from its atmospheric introduction to a straight-ahead riff and quick-arriving verse, and though it’s more mellow in its impact, “Even Deeper” is as effective as it is in no small part for its willingness to return to the chorus, likewise “We’re in This Together” and “The Fragile.” Between ‘Left’ and ‘Right’, the former proves the more structured and the latter more abstract at least in the general listening experience — true enough to “left-brained” and “right-brained” — but while The Fragile essentially reads are two distinct entireties, each with its purposeful beginning, middle and end, the time it spends flitting between different sounds and styles throws open the bounds of expectation, and Reznor and producer Alan Moulder execute and bring the material to bear with such a feeling of control that, in combination with the high grade songwriting on display — the fact that many of these tracks are still pop songs — the album remains accessible even to the moderately adventurous listener.

I’ll happily argue for The Fragile as the peak-era of Nine Inch Nails. It would be 2005 before the band returned with the strikingly toothless With Teeth, and proceeded into atmospheres and craft that, while interesting for someone operating at the level of attention Reznor invariably would receive, were largely void of innovation. Nothing lasts forever. And in that regard, it’s all the more fortunate that The Fragile is as long and as comprehensive as it is — an expanded edition showed up some years ago as well — since this glut of material represents a deep place of personal expression to which even Reznor has said he’s not willing to return. Fair enough. More than two decades on, The Fragile stands out not only from its era — to wit, it came out the same day as Type O Negative‘s World Coming Down — but from what would follow in its wake. It was the end of one century and the beginning of another, and The Fragile didn’t so much paint a vision of the future as it did reconcile the present with what was about to be.

I love this record. I hope you enjoy it too.

—

Blueberry picking in Manalapan? In the back of the car, The Pecan calling out the names of different trucks, mostly accurately, and narrating the drive. “Going this way. In the grey car. Cement mixer round and round!” He’ll be three in October. There was a time we were worried about his speech. That is less the case now.

So anyway, we’re on our way to Manalapan. To pick blueberries. I don’t eat them — too much sugar — but The Patient Mrs. and The Pecan will enjoy. We found fresh strawberries last Friday after going to Space Farms, so this feels like an appropriate follow-up. Elsewhere, and not that far away, people are dying. People are marching for long-overdue freedom. We are going to pick blueberries. It is important to remember the context in which one’s actions take place.

This week was hard. Not as hard as it would be if I had COVID-19. And not as hard as it would be if I was marching for long-overdue freedom. But hard. Living in my head with Bad Voice hard.

The Patient Mrs. and I discussed this week when we might go places together again. New Jersey is starting indoor dining next week, which seems absurd and dangerous to me. I said another two weeks at least to see how things shake out before, say, she goes to a grocery store. It’s been since March, so if she’s antsy to do a thing — anything — I get it. She leaves the house plenty but doesn’t see a ton of people, and she’s much more of an extrovert than I am. The Pecan being back in part-time daycare the last two weeks (they’re off this coming week) has eased the general tension level some, but I remain an impatient, miserable shit, so I expect basically to continue ruining whatever positivity might surround me at any given point, including that emanating from my beautiful wife and child.

A contaminant, then.

New Gimme Radio show today — they’ve started calling it Gimme Metal instead of Gimme Radio, presumably because they’re branching out — Gimme Country, etc. — and I guess that makes sense. But if Gimme Radio is the umbrella under which Gimme Metal resides, the show’s still on Gimme Radio. The Obelisk Show isn’t especially metal, most of the time. I don’t know. Maybe I need to listen to more metal.

Anyway, 5PM Eastern if you’re up for it. If you’re not, that’s fine too but don’t tell them I said that. Playlist is here. Listen here: http://gimmeradio.com

Nos habitant stultitia.

Great and safe weekend. Be careful. Be well. FRM.

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Yesterday, Queens of the Stone Age started the process of teasing the release of their next album by putting up a minute-long YouTube clip in which a manipulated version of frontman Josh Homme‘s voice said the word ‘gold’ over and over again. Today, they follow by announcing the title of their seventh full-length will be Villains and that to record it, the five-piece has teamed with producer Mark Ronson, whose credits include the pop-superstar likes of Paul McCartney, Amy Winehouse Adele, and many, many others who sell a lot, a lot, a lot of records to a lot, a lot, a lot of people. In the video below, among the other names, one will find Duran Duran. So there’s that.

Playing to mass-market pop is nothing new for Queens of the Stone Age, of course. 11 years after breaking through to mainstream consciousness with what’s now a heavy rock landmark in 2002’s Songs for the Deaf, the band issued their most recent outing, 2013’s …Like Clockwork (review here) — they also had two records in between in 2005’s Lullabies to Paralyze and 2007’s Era Vulgaris — and songs like “If I Had a Tail” and “Smooth Sailing” still don’t need much more than the recitation of the title to get stuck in the head of anyone who heard them. In announcing Villains in the skit below directed by Liam Lynch (Tenacious D) they give a snippet preview of a track called “Feet Don’t Fail Me” that would seem to work toward a similar danceability as the latter. Again, fair territory for them at this point.

More as I hear/see it. For now, here’s the clip and the band’s upcoming tour dates:

Queens of the Stone Age, Villains announcement

Directed by: Liam Lynch

Queens of the Stone Age on tour:
06/22-25 – Montebello, QC Amnesia Rockfest
07/13 – Auckland, NZ Logan Campbell
07/16 – Darwin, AU Convention Center
07/19 – Sydney, AU Horden Pavilion
07/20 – Melbourne, AU Festival Hall
07/22 – Byron Bay, AU Splendour in the Grass
07/28-30 – Naeba, JP Fuji Rock Festival
08/11-13 – San Francisco, CA Outside Lands Festival
09/15-17 – Chicago, IL Riot Fest

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