Primus are back with a great new album. This has the classic Primus sound of the 90's. Probably their best album since Sailing The Seas of Cheese. Cant wait until The Big Day Out.
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Primus are back with a great new album. This has the classic Primus sound of the 90's. Probably their best album since Sailing The Seas of Cheese. Cant wait until The Big Day Out.
Primus are a band who need no introduction. For the past 27 years the group
have followed in the footsteps of boundary-pushing artists like Frank Zappa and
Pink Floyd to create some of the most original and inventive music in
existence-and they've collaborated with everyone from Tom Waits to Tom Morello
over the years in the process.
However nothing could properly prepare listeners for Green Naugahyde, which is
the band's first album in eleven years featuring the line-up of bassist/singer
Les Claypool, guitarist Larry LaLonde and drummer Jay Lane.
Like Primus' early output before they were international superstars, there
was no earth-shattering catalyst behind Green Naugahyde other than the fact that
all three of these musicians-and life-long collaborators who have
worked together in various contexts-were getting the itch to experiment again.
“There wasn't a lot of pre-thought to this as much as, ‘Oh here we are, we
should make a record,’” explains Claypool. “I've been playing with Jay
quite a lot over the past ten years and we have an intuitive bond so for me he
was a natural choice to be back in the mix,” Claypool continues when asked how
Lane came about rejoining the band after nearly two decades apart.
Claypool and LaLonde also concur that Lane injected the band with a new
energy that's evident in every note of Green Naugahyde. “We recorded this
album in the same way we always do but having Jay there made this a
whole different experience,” explains LaLonde. “It definitely made it more
collaborative and it made us excited about the album as we went along because we
had so much fun in the process.” Produced and engineered by
Claypool in his personal studio, Rancho Relaxo, in Northern California
that's crammed full of vintage gear, the album's warm sound and unique tones
are pure Primus and could never be obtained via a set of Internet plug-
ins. “I come from a long line of auto mechanics so I'm always buying these
old jalopies and trying to fix them up and I approach my recording gear the
same way,” Claypool adds with a laugh.
Sonically Green Naugahyde expands on the Primus' incomparable sound and also sees them bringing it into the next millennium. “If I were to look at all of our records it seems like this is reminiscent of the early stuff. Obviously with Jay there's a newness to it, but because he left the band right before we recorded our first record, his approach has an eerie harkening to the old Frizzle Fry days.” Correspondingly from the futuristic groove of"Tragedy's A'Comin'" to the atmospheric experimentation of “Jilly's On Smack” and demented swing of “Last Salmon Man,” Green Naugahyde is a cerebral and complex album that, like all of the band's output, is teeming with the band's signature blend of whimsy and underlying darkness.
“It's funny because when you look at Primus lyrics throughout our entire
career there are extremely dark sto-ries in there but it's told from the
viewpoint of a race car driver or a fisherman-and then you throw in a song
like "Wynona's Big Brown Beaver,” which is just a silly song that just
happened to become huge; the per-ception from the outside has been lighter than
it actually is, especially if you don't scratch the surface,“
Claypool explains, citing the Coen brothers of an example of how his film
counterparts deal with destructive issues through similarly colorful characters.
Admittedly it's hard to worry about the apocalypse or cancer
when you're grooving along to "Tragedy's A'Comin'” but ultimately that
duality is what has kept Primus rele-vant. Simply put, Primus confronts the
issues we don't want to think about in a creative way that makes the unbearable
bearable.
Green Naugahyde also sees Claypool-who has spent the last decade working with the supergroup Oysterhead (alongside the Police's Stewart Copeland and Phish's Trey Anastasio) as well as Colonel Les Claypool's Fearless Flying Frog Brigade and various other experimental musical projects-stretching out in the lyrical department. “Over the past ten years of working on my own stuff and working with other musi-cians-especially non traditional rock musicians like sitar players, vibraphonists, cellists and saxophonists-I've really expanded my notion of what is appropriate for Primus,” Claypool explains. “On this album I decided I wasn't going to hold back and I was going to do everything I wanted to try vocally instead of having one vocal line narrating the story.” This is evident in songs like “Eternal Consumption Engine” and “Extinction Burst” which feature layered vocal tracks that showcase Claypool's range and see his voice acting as an addition-al instrument.
Above all Green Naugahyde is a Primus record with all of the magic and
mystery that phrase entails-and while no one can say for sure what the future
will hold in store for the band, the most important thing is that
the album exists and will inevitably hold its own in the band's impressive
cannon of music. “Even back in the old days people would always ask me, ‘How
long is Primus going to go on’ and I would always say ‘It’s going
to go until it's not fun anymore' and at the end of the day it just wasn't fun
anymore so we stopped,” Claypool explains. “I think giving it this much
time to sit and ferment or whatever the hell you want to call it has made
it fun again,” he summarizes with a laugh.
“We're still doing our own thing and we've got to own it.”
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