Primus
Frizzle Fry

THE REVIEW

Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to complete madness! 

These are Primus and this is their first album "Frizzle Fry" (1990).

Les Claypool on bass pursues the impossible, reaches it, and outpaces it like Stoner's Ducati with Rossi's Yamaha on the straight of the Chinese track; his voice is ungraceful, irreverent, out of tune, you either love it or hate it, there’s nothing you can do about it, and I, despite loving powerful, warm, and in-tune voices like Chris Cornell, Robert Plant, Ian Gillan, Eddie Vedder... I can't help but love him... He makes me laugh to death and amazes me every single time.. His voice fits, it always fits, it is the necessary complement to Primus's music, there couldn't be any other... Every time I hear Les sing and play (playing is a bit reductive in his case) the bass, the image that materializes for me is of Popeye chugging a can of spinach and bending the bass to his will with fingers that frantically dart over the neck and strings, yet his voice remains unchanged...

I hope I got the idea across...

Larry LaLonde's guitar is effective and tremendously ingenious in following the riffs that good old Les dictates, it stays silent when it must, as drums and bass cover everything worthily even without it, to amaze with solos that send cold shivers down your spine, sometimes it only hints with background mumblings, sometimes it explodes...

Tim Alexander is not a man, he is a drum machine, with his crazy doubles, stop & go, impressive work on anything he touches, light jazz just in the right measure where these acrobats have moments of respite, devastating prog accelerations, funky, metal power when he bangs, technique taken to the extreme.. One of the best drummers I've ever heard, sometimes I have a hard time believing what my ears hear...

How to define Primus? How to categorize them? What music do they make? The answer that comes to mind is: funky-progressive-hardcore-punk-rock-metal-jazz-freeacidpsychedelicjazz etc... The second answer, which seems to me the most plausible is: how the hell should I know? These guys play in an insanely kickass way and have balls that touch their chins! Who the hell cares what genre they are?

The only comparison I find possible to the unruliness and sonic depravity of Primus is Mr. Bungle by another madman, Mike Patton; indeed, only deviants can understand each other.

Special mention for the cover, truly one of the most beautiful and ingenious ever seen..

The album in question is a concentrate of insane fragments, breath-taking tempo changes, Leonardo-like inventions in music, the rhythm section would make anyone pale just from the first track "To Defy The Laws Of Tradition" (with an initial homage to Rush), six minutes and forty (!) of pure technical lessons in bass, guitar, and especially drums, doubled beyond belief, super-fast rolls, violent breaks, jazz lines, complete delirium accompany Les doing whatever he wants. The guitar sometimes follows it, sometimes diverges, then, after a fantastic bass and percussion interlude, it launches into a splendid solo. The voice is as irreverent as it gets, mocking, sometimes it seems it's all a joke and that Les sings deliberately like that, but secretly has a good voice.. It’s not true... The songs, take the next one "Too many puppies", are real puzzles that can be deciphered in billions of ways (the beginning reminds of "Blind" by Korn...), it's not possible to fully describe them in a few words, you just have to listen to them over and over again to realize. Listen to "Frizzle Fry" to understand who you are dealing with, the heaviness of the bass and drum riff, the guitarist’s genius, the thousand tempo changes, the monstrous prog acceleration at the end, technique personified bows to these three. Or "John the fisherman" with its timings and countertimings, "Pudding time", "Harold of the rocks"...

Each track is worthy of praise.

Dedicated to those who thought Flea was the best bassist around and Red Hot the best funky band on the planet..