Flipper
Gone Fishin'

THE REVIEW

"You know, I think drugs have done some good for us. I really do. And if you don't believe that drugs have done any good for us, do me a favor: go home, take all your CDs and burn them. Because you know what? The musicians who made all that great music and changed your lives, well... they were seriously high, damn it!"

Hicks was right. Was he also referring to the Flipper? Maybe not, but the aphorism could easily apply to them as well.

Four stragglers (lacking grace) who partly take the reins of what was invented by the Velvet Underground and partly the (sonic) wild aspect of the Stooges, transforming everything into an experimental, noisy, and decadently hardcore mix that both internalized and, at the same time, emphasized their discomfort, their existential pain.

Violent. Disturbed. Hallucinatory. Claustrophobic. Noisy.

In "Album - Generic" (1982), the debut album of the four Californians, they screamed their malaise with disarming naturalness, setting the rules for "modern" noise rock from which Sonic Youth to Nirvana, and not just them, would draw. Not only, because the influence of this seminal album is noticeable, from the eighties onwards, on various occasions of rock production in a broad sense.

And two years after "Album", before the death of Will Shatter (vocals and bass), they return with this "Gone Fishin'", which in itself does not add anything that hasn't already been said in the debut album, but which deserves to be recognized at least for having continued, albeit less incisively, on the destructive path of an epochal album.