Primus
Pork Soda

THE REVIEW

In the ocean of rock music, one can sometimes encounter characters who have little to do with the seriousness and presumption of many "serious" artists, and one such character is the pyrotechnic Les Claypool, a imaginative and eclectic bassist with a mocking personality and a typically Zappa-like taste for provocation and the absurd. Let it be clear, there is nothing particularly comic or reassuring in this album; if anything, the opposite occurs, but the group's cartoonish style manages to open new perspectives for the listener.

This gives life to a series of tracks that exploit a range of irregular rhythms, guitar dissonances, and raw bass slaps to tell jester-like stories of desperate solitude ("Nature Boy"), paint scenes of paranoia and suicide (the bluesy "Bob", chilling in its catatonic progression) or simply mock the figure of the presumptuous and arrogant music critic ("The Pressman", with touches of Indian-like psychedelia and even a hint of Pink Floyd). Between sketches, the band performs curious and sometimes not entirely successful instrumental numbers (the nearly useless "Pork Chop's Little Ditty" 1 and 2) while managing to create a hypnotic and vaguely unsettling episode like "Wounded Knee", a sort of psychedelic dub for marimba and drums. Tracks like "Mr. Krinkle" belong to the horror genre, and here the underlying seriousness of all the other tracks surfaces more explicitly, both in the leaden atmospheres and in Claypool's tense/frightened singing. Completing the whole are the (decidedly boring) jam "Hamburger Train" and another absolutely worthless instrumental, "Hail Santa".

This album marks the attainment of a certain maturity in the band's sound (although using such a term when talking about Primus might sound nonsensical and blasphemous), where surreal and macabre lyrics perfectly fit a musical backdrop staged with the utmost care and in the most spectacular way possible. "Pork Soda" is a contemporary rock opera, a repugnant and malevolent portrait of the ills of modern society, somewhat like a less apocalyptic and more satirical version of "Animals", with Les Claypool's distorting mask instead of Roger Waters' depressed and paranoid seriousness. And after all this, don't say you didn't laugh even a little.