Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Primus
Label: ATO Records
Release: 2011
Duration: 50:31
Rating: 4.5/5
Have you heard of Primus and their musical philosophy, the one where it’s fine, almost essential, to use pop-ish patterns to wreck everything pop stands for at its core? If you haven’t, I won’t hold it against you, because in these three decades of my life I’ve met very few people who knew this freakish, manic musical trip inside out, and the few who did came from bass-player circles. I’m undoubtedly lucky that my younger brother, knowingly or not, infected me with the Primus catalog. As a bassist, he could barely resist the contagious influence of Les Claypool, a little guy with a goofy voice, crazy ideas and seriously hefty talent. Shortly before the turn of the millennium, just a year before the sinking of the 20th century to be exact, the walls of the small room I shared with my brother shook from the collective drone of the songs on Antipop. After that, every sign of life from this rather unusual trio went quiet and vanished from the face of the planet. That lasted until this year, when I stumbled across the news, purely by chance, that the long-missed and long-absent drummer Jay Lane had rejoined the crew of the charismatic ideologue of antipop iconoclasm and the minimalist guitarist Larry LaLonde, and that a new, already seventh, excursion into the unknown was on the way. And what an excursion it is!
Not only because Primus are, at least in my eyes, one truly legendary band and a monumental pillar of the nineties, but also because, all those years notwithstanding, I never quite managed to shake the taste, both bitter and brutally penetrating, of how their rhythms, their jokingly serious melodies and their psychotic lyrics about cheese, fishermen, the psychedelic effects of beef and another dose of cheese and mud (or maybe of banned substances too) sank their teeth into my cerebellum and thoroughly boiled the brain of a former grunger with a definition of alternative that was entirely their own. Through the eyes of a teenager, Primus were anarchists and nihilists back then, and I was curious how I’d see them now, a good 20 years after my first exposure to their “corrupting” influence. Back then I simply couldn’t stand them, yet I couldn’t fully resist their truly abrasive magnetism of a peculiar kind of cuteness either.
And in 2011 nothing has changed. This is a band that, with the records Pork Soda, Sailing On The Seas Of Cheese, Brown Album, the aforementioned Antipop and, yes, Tales From The Punchbowl, was able to completely naturally blow up everything that used to be sacred and untouchable to me in music, while also passing the test of time and keeping me coming back again and again. Now they’ve written thirteen stories that feel primal and brittle, but in spite of everything, they work! Green Naughyde is a fun and contradictory string of utterly recognizable Primus aesthetics. The guitars are even audible, though LaLonde hasn’t become the new guitar god in the meantime. Claypool stays loyal to his irritating but effective bass-playing self-indulgence, and he hasn’t fixed his comical vocals either, which, I don’t know, always remind me of Kermit from The Muppet Show. Jay Lane still crumbles the rhythm in a way where every drumhead and cymbal gets fully used and abused, and the band sounds like they never stopped working, which fans follow fanatically, while the rest of the crowd … The album opens the door to your corrupted subconscious with the manic, collapsing yet obsessively repetitive squealing of Hennepin Crawler, and it’s instantly clear that Claypool remains stubbornly faithful to his writing patterns. When he senses somewhere in his guts, or maybe near the rectum, that the time has come for a solo in the middle of a rather bizarre narration, he pours a fat, sumo-wrestler-greasy string of fluidly flying notes into your ears. The manic ride continues with Last Salmon Man, which picks up right where John The Fisherman left off.
I liked the comparison that the original sounded like it was played by a seriously stoned, LSD-soaked Rush, but Primus are bolder by another ten yards with their funkadelic, fired-up improvising. It’s an experiment happening live and nothing is caught in any firm framework, and the rather free deconstructivism of various mechanical forms is still compact and has a head and a tail. Among the punchier moments on the record is the patient track Tragedy’s a’ Comin, which calls up echoes of songs from Frizzle Fry. It gets outdone within a few bars by a truly sick combination of excellent, seemingly incompatible elements in Eyes of the Squirrel, which nonetheless work effectively and damn vividly. And this incompatible play of odd pieces, which in the end come together into a sound as solid as a fortress and wholly unified, reflects the whole of Green Naugahyde. Primus are still weirdos to the nth degree, but they know their business well!
Surprisingly, the album Green Naughahyde is very listenable and infectious, and maybe before long it’ll get abused in some movie for escapism in its purest form, I don’t know, by the Coen brothers themselves. Despite 27 years of existence, Primus are as fresh and fashionable as when they first showed up on the scene, only now the new millennium is more used to unconventional approaches, of which Primus still have plenty up their sleeves. These guys are definitely kings of weirdness, and this seventh orbital flight around the cheesed-up planet is more digestible than you’d guess at first glance, without having heard the record. Absurdity is the new commandment, and Primus, as modern-day evangelists, preach it very convincingly and with great quality, age and competition be damned!
Line-up
Les Claypool – vocals, bass
Larry “Ler” LaLonde – guitar, backing vocals
Jay Lane – drums, backing vocals
Production
Les Claypool
Tracklist
1. Prelude to a Crawl
2. Hennepin Crawler
3. Last Salmon Man (Fisherman’s Chronicles, Part IV)
4. Eternal Consumption Engine
5. Tragedy’s a’ Comin
6. Eyes of the Squirrel
7. Jilly’s on Smack
8. Lee Van Cleef
9. Moron TV
10. Green Ranger
11. HOINFODAMAN
12. Extinction Burst
13. Salmon Men
