Flipper
Love

THE REVIEW

Weeds never die. Maybe they age, become more bitter, with an even stronger flavor; maybe with aging, they soften - a delicate and light taste -, maybe you choose an adequate wine, a side dish to feel less alone. Perhaps, if the weed is so bad that it ends up kicking the bucket, it surely would have been bad enough to drag someone down with it. I'm not sure, I think I prefer the weed that hurts you.

Bruce Loose's voice has become sharper, tougher. It has some new nuances, suitable for telling his stories of inhuman suffering and human endurance. More than bad grass, he seems like a psychopath with a communication fixation. Whatever it is, it is, but he's alive... the Flipper are alive, pissed off like teenagers and with the liver of eighty-two-year-olds. They're angry old men, but still alive, and in a single run, they kick the asses of 80% of today's youth who pick up any instrument because, despite trying not to have class - one of those bullshit for people who try to be serious -, class isn't water, and they've always drunk little of it.
And so the sonic youth ages, shows wrinkles, tours the world in a tour-bus for tired records... A tour-bus that someone smarter would fill with babes and alcohol. The Flipper, no, they have no wrinkles and no tour-bus. Just scars.

Will Shatter has been gone for a while, and now Steve DePace, Ted Falconi (yes, the one who seems to play the guitar with a grinder) and Bruce Loose take on a godson, one of those they've created, and they tell him to smash heads with joy. And that's how Chris Novoselic takes the black Gibson bass - the black one - off the hook where it had been hanging and starts playing with his idols, with those whom he listened to three times a day on the advice of his friend Buzz Osburne. And the bass is there, the instrument that has always been the prince of Flipper's delusions, this time with some riffs, some major, with highs that you didn't imagine from Novoselic since you remembered him as a Don Abbondio "almost" any.

The recipe has been the same for thirty years: ultra-slow, ultra-despairing version of Hardcore, as if Joy Division decided to play "Damaged" thinking they were Black Sabbath... all under the supervision of the ultra-drugged-out and wasted Iggy from Funhouse. Everything ultra, no doubt. And so the monoliths over six minutes - "Only One Answer"; "Why Can't You See"; "Old Graves" - I don't narrate them in their slow and marked progress, brown trail, diffused and profuse suffering... It would be like revealing who the murderer is. I'll tell you that Bruce at a certain point changes, stops narrating and sings - "Be Good, Child!"; "Learn to Live"; "Night Falls". That melody you didn't expect from a bastard who doesn't want to entertain you, but just wants to hurt you. Could it be that he's aging? For Love (2009), they enlist another illustrious old man, Jack Endino, and it's all off to Novoselic's house for a "Camp Band" cool and profitable.

And now you have to choose. I used to shout the right things, and now I'm a splendid forty-year-old... or... Damn Bastards, am I still alive?