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The Bits
Smoking Some Resin
What you’ve got to realise about the primative importance of sound is that it works Below the Level of Human Consciouseness. So when these furry and not so furry freaks gathered in a room to try and get together a set of hum dinging tunes for the stratosphere they truly didn’t probably realise that they were going to get wrecked on their own blindspots with no bleeding cross-over whatsoever.
The opening track, “I don’t know who put ’em there”, bursts forth with one riff and one riff only, the lead guitarist is spinning in a van-halen patented groove of ultra-precision fretwork-homework the drummer is trying to maintain on a feckin epilectic with a capital E, the bass player has just worked out how to plug in his bass for the first time and the lead singer has still yet to write the lyrics, only getting into the “swing” of things about 8 minutes in whilst the lead guitarist is still reaching for that perfect inflection of the same riff. Of course this bears no repeating except for the outreaching brazeness of the title “Smoking some resin”, a clue, if ever there was one, about what is actually going on here. The production values are second to nothing at all, capturing nothing at all except the Vibe. I’ve been playing this at parties for years, during those late hours when everyone has gotten properly blatted to the point of no return and are barely able to register the dust blowing through their vapid interiors, never mind raise objection to the ambulent temperature of the sonics in the room, and without exception they are all fucking grooving to this ultimately comforting peon to absentee rock and roll revitalism. I mean Who is in Control!!??
Perhaps the latent spirit of true, unfettered rock’n’roll had crept out and formed a secret society whose meetings were only accessable to the truly inept and brainless dumbfounded simpletons who were, get this, on drugs!!! And these conferences were split up amongst a random dozen collective spirits that lit rock’n’roll campfires at certain phases of the moon and got spilt out like drunken wine at the local heathen gathering place. Once you get the drift it’s pretty easy to spot — Sunburned Hand of the Man, Residual Echoes, Burnt Hills, Vibracathedral Orchestra, all supp from that cupp.
But it’s not all walking, as they say. With the five sassy tracks here much is explored and usefully un-mapped out for those willing to let go of hi-fi fidelity and the airbrushed sonic pallette of the Media Priests of the Big Lie. Here is a humble kind of refutation.
By the second track any kind of riffola has been dispersed to the four winds and the vocals have become proper earth bound, the band is grooving and the air is thick. It’s dirty funky like a hedgerow witch coven gone all ecstatic at the coming of a new dawn, sitting in timeless hours getting all sexual with the owls and the rabbits.
A light starry hour of “eye dee” cuts into a right thrashing trough of interbreeding with “where you are the node” a yodelling offset whose momentum keeps many a blind man happy.
“Space frontier Fox” really dugs it out of the happy spill and lays out a Melted-Plastic-Brain riff that stops time and goes on until your heart is more than content that, yeah, it’s still goin’ on, and can I have some more please?
“We are mon” properly gives you the license to ill at the very end with possibly a more competent drummer who dunt let the side down once in all 15 minutes of dodging around the one verse of the whole song, delivered in just about the left time, and then takes a good warm conversation to get in it’s excuses to leave you all gently back in your own body at the end of it all. Cup of tea anyone?
Piss off the pigs!! Dust off that bong, spark up a bowl and get ready to fly!! Whilst still lying downiii