2018: June 14th

Cracked this out yesterday. First time in a long while. Always really liked this album and this song.

New Drinking, Fighting, F*&king, and Crying is up HERE to read.

Playlist from June 13th:

Les Claypool - Of Whales and Woe
Deafheaven - Honeycomb single
Deafheaven - Canary Yellow single
Corniglia - Eponymous
Junior Jr. - Obligatory Demo
Nabihah Iqbal - Weighing of the Heart
Lustmord - Dark Places of the Earth
James Brown's Funky People - Part 3

No card today.

Les Claypool's Duo De Twang cover Primus

After finding that video for Lee Van Cleef and posting it earlier in the week it dawned on me just how long it'd been since I had a Primus jag and I immediately set about correcting that, beginning with a couple of spins of 2011's Green Naugahyde. Then yesterday, as if the Universe decided to reward me, I found that Mr. Claypool's Duo de Twang is not only releasing an album but have shared their version of Primus' Jerry Was A Race Car Driver, which they cover (along with Wynona's Big Brown Beaver, the Bee Gees' Stayin' Alive and - this I can't wait to hear - Alice in Chains' Man in the Box) on their forthcoming album Four Foot Shack, out February 4th on ATO Records.

Bad ass.

I've never quite understood how ol' Les fell in with the jam thing - a scene that I have a little more tolerance and understanding for after recently reading former AV Club current The Dissolve writer Nathan Rabin's You Don't Know Me But You Don't Like Me.

A little.

I believe this jam thing began for Claypool with his Fearless Flying Frog Brigade project. I saw the Frog Brigade (who Duo de Twang also cover on the album) back in... ummm, late early 00's maybe? It was cool but they were opening for Phil Lesh at Wisconsin's Alpine Valley and that was a long way to go from Chicago for a half hour opening set (cuz we left after after the Brigade played - the smell of patchouli doesn't agree with me). Totally worth it though.

Anyway, more Les Claypool in any capacity is always a good thing in my opinion.

More info on the album on Exclaim! here.

MIRV - COSMODROME

Okay, this is both weird and awesome. Back in the middle 90's Mr. Brown found this record by an artist named MIRV titled Cosmodrome. MIRV (it's an acronym on the album cover - no idea what it stands for) was apparently a buddy of Les Claypool's who also played a few things on the record. Anyway, it's a concept record about a future where the ultimate tier as a musician was to play a place called the Cosmodrome. To do this though you had to be selected, and then you had to, um, have your face shaved off.

Awesome, eh?

Anyway, I have a dubbed cassette copy somewhere that I haven't seen in years. I never found a copy of the record in a physical record shop (believe me I looked) and now the things been off my radar so long that I'm not sure how I never tried to find it online. I just searched on ebay and amazon while typing this and found a wopping one copy on each, so it's apparently still fairly hard to come by.

The record is amazing. Very Zappa-esque, and it runs the gamut from blues to Primus-like weirdness to a crescendo - where the protagonist does indeed get selected and then have his face shaved off ("Don't be afraid, body alterations aren't that painful") that can only be described as frightening and machine-like.

So I just flipped over to youtube looking for something else, MIRV not having been on my mind in years, and here's a video from back in the day for one of the songs.

The internet truly is the human collective unconscious transmuted into tangible information.

Weird.

image courtesy of artist direct

Primus - Jerry Was a Race Car Driver

image courtesy of Prawnsong.com