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Image provided by: Onondaga Community College
FEATURES April 16,1992 Her Big Opinion By Cate “ Emotionally Available” Smith Primus Seas of Cheese Interscope When I first heard of Primus, I was reading their praises in the ever hilarious pages of Rolling Stone ( I swear to GOD I wasn’t actually reading it, just y’know, thumbing absently through it looking at the pretty pictures) (HONEST). Since almost anything I see illiciting any kind of excitement from that particular rag ends up sucking so hard it creates a vacuum around my inner ear, I was tres hesitant (that’s French for DOUBT IT) to lend Primus an ear. But, wonder of wonders, those old bastards nailed a for real for real Thang. Primus is a funkcore rampage through the landscape of an audible nervous breakdown, complete with hair pin turns, quantum leaps and a serious penchant for confounding and gloriously twisted humor. Pneumatic drill type guitars, flip flopping contortive bass grooves and lyrics that make Syd Barret seem like Elizabeth Barret Browning. These potential Hutchings residents happen to kick righteous ass with The Covetted Shoe of Eargasmic Depravity. Buy this record. Steal it if you must. Concrete Blonde W a lk in g in London I R S I have gone through about a million changes over this damn record. When I first got it I was so excited just to have Concrete Blonde, that I decided it was brilliant before I had the shrinkwrap off. Then I listened to it and said, “ Well, it’s not exactly Bloodletting, but I guess it’s OKAY, I guess.” So the theme of this review was gonna be let’s just go on and on about how great Concrete Blonde is even if their new record is j ust kinda eh. So by this time I had written about three different reviews about this one record, y’know and it was getting to be an obsession. My day felt lonely and incomplete if at some point I didn’t change my mind about Walking and rewrite the damn piece. Finally I decided to cut the shit and hate the thing. Just about the time that happened I lent it out, because of course I had voted myself its enemy and wasn’t in any way attached to it anymore. SO THEN GU ESS W H A T TH E HELL HAPPENED ANYWAY??! I found myself strolling around a hallway humming my least favorite cut!! Betrayed by my own subconcious!! I was in total denial. It s a great album. I can’t bear to part with it. But it’s an acquired taste, like an artichoke or something. It’s been almost two weeks straight now and I haven’t had to sit down and rewrite this piece, so it must be love. Or at least a deep curiousity and sense of possession. Who cares? It’s a great record. Once you get used to it. Billy Bragg Peels Session Dutch East India/Strange Fruit Everybody knows someone who’s convinced Billy Bragg is a genius. I always feel a sense of new wave guilt for not being all that familiar with his work. But what the hell for!! Listening to this 19 track disc of a boy, his brain and a guitar dispatches all those sneaky woes doublplusquick and happily replaces them with an amiable cynicism and matter-of-fact humor that utterly wallops blues into powder and cheekily farts them away!! This English minimalistic troubador has more to say about Life, That Serial That’s Supposed To Be Good For You (but somehow always manages to frighten the piss out of you instead) than all the moaning blowhard fits to come slithering across the ocean in the past five years. Bragg’s work is traced from ’83 to ’88 on BBC radio broadcasts of the John Peels Show, and it allows the listener (even an ignorant one like moi) to watch his knack for homing in on life’s demented ironies blossom into a truly fluid style of songwriting and simple engaging delivery. And to think I’ve been missing out all these years. Costello M ighty Like A R o s e Warner Bros. To understand the success and failure of Mighty Like a Rose, all you really have to do is play it back to back with nearly any Elvis record, even ’ 8 9 ’ s Spike. Of course comparing it to something as early as My Aim is True would not only be nostalgic but unfair-Elvis has evolved out of that economy of words and shit-hot thrown together genius stage and into more thoughtful, emotional pieces since the late seventies and show his ability to slow up and ponder without swaying to the side of the road and dying like a lot of his punk rock contemporaries ended up doing. Mighty triumphs in the slight of hand lyrical way that every album Elvis makes has. Anyone who can kick out something like “ And now that you’re back where I pretend you belong/I wonder every night and day/How long” can’t have completely lost their touch. But right next to something as magic and fluid as “ Playboy to a Man” , there’s something as inane and tosspot as “Hurry Down Doomsday (The Bugs Are Taking Over)” or the grating opening cut “ The Other Side of Summer” . M u s ically these songs are adequate to show case E .C .’ s industrius wording, when it’s there that is, but they are a far cry from the bouyant melodic runaround that when coupled with his lyrics has defined Elvis as a gifted songwriter. Mighty is inconsistant and over complicated at times by extravagent instrumentation and bloated arrange ments that weigh it down, even at its finest moments. They Might Be Giants A p o llo 18 Elektra ' After suffering years of abuse and neglect at the hands of those unqualified to judge (critics) TMBG have turned out a record that makes them look as trivial and toyish as they have often been wrongly a c c u s e d o f b e i n g . A b i g disappointment that I can hardly stand to tell you about without having to stop and curse the record review editors of at least four major butthead music rags that have obviously jinxed our two amiable wack-job heroes. All I’m gonna say is that if any more cool bands put out shitty music this year, I’m going to buy a car, learn to drive and set out on a high profile drive-by house- egging spree that will bring the record industry to its bloated, perspiring, pillow-soft knees!! I mean it! Rollins Band The End of Silence Imago Until I heard Everything W ent Black, an SST release that traces Black Flag from its pre-Henry daze, I hated their little hardcore teenangst tattooed behinds. Why? Because even when I was hip to the message, the sound of Big Galoot Rollins drove me to such destraction that I couldn’t stand in the same room as his bitchy, testosterone aided whining without wanting to douse my self in napalm. Why? Well, fellow new wave comrades, I spent most of high school (or maybe most of my educational career from the age of twelve up) avoiding too-stacked, thugjocks who longed to be down, but somehow never got with the fact that no amount of sprayed on street come-hither was ever gonna mask the distinct odor of Big Bully Meathead Brute. You can’t stick a Buttzilla Drinking Songs Butt Pirate FINALLY after months of waiting, searching the shelves of record stores across the land each and evey day, from AM to PM, from sea to shining, oil-slickened sea, after hours of prayers and expectations that seemed to go unanswered up to some unfeeling, unlistening faceless God millions of miles away I T ’ S HERE!! AND ONLY A DOLLAR! Grunge seeps to new depths ala the Buttsters as they torch out hand over hand servings of distorted cycloningguitar heave over meaty farting bass lines and bludgeoning pnuematic percussion. I defy anyone to decipher singer A J Mancabelli’s vocal flip outs but guess what! Who cares what he’s saying! The Thang rocks. I have no idea where to get a hold of this tape (I stole my copy from Screaming Lee Baker’s home-but he only had one copy, so don’t bother with that option). But Desert Shore and Spectrum are good guesses. If not, you’ll just have to drag your happy ass to a Butzilla gig and try begging them. But for a dollar, it’s worth the humiliation. frat boy in a leather jacket and expect him to alchem ize into something Real; Why? Because it doesn’t wash. Take Jello Biafra, the other Angry Young Mouthpiece of that time and place that first spat out Hank. Jello was and is a true blue geek. Under fed, badly complexioned, manic and nervous and dressed like an average bloke. Anger was believable coming out of him. He got beat up in highschool by guys like Hank Rollins. He had reasons to be angry. And he would explain those reasons to you in a way that would get you angry tool What did Hank have to be angry about? Running out of brews? So now wussup wit Hank? He’s back, like a case of Herpes, like emotional luggage that you can misplace but never lose, like a recurrent nightmare where no matter how much stuff you put back, you still end up in the ten item line with twenty items. Now he is showcasing his atrophied delin quency under the belabored flag of Original White Guy (OWG) on a record that should be filed in six feet of pavement. Bad, boring and brainless. Trust me. Why? Just shut up and lissen. Hank Rollins contributing to society began and ended with ‘ ‘Louie Louie” more than ten years ago.
