Primus – Frizzle
Fry
(Caroline, 1990)
Buy the album here
As
with so much of the music I love, Bill
& Ted’s Bogus Journey deserves the credit for bringing Primus into my
world. A rat-tailed Les Claypool
screaming and grumbling about some cat called Tommy was unlike anything I had
heard, and I can remember rewinding the soundtrack cassette over and over to try
and get my head round it. The whole
thing felt dirty and weird, like some sort of anti-music to my 10-year-old
ears. I don’t think I knew if I liked it
or not, but it was the most intriguing song on an album I still listen to
today. And while that film’s soundtrack
sent me in the direction of Primus, Primus also guided me towards Frank Zappa,
Tom Waits, and Buckethead. Their
influence on my ears has been immense and undeniable, and no album has caught
their attention more than Frizzle Fry.
From
start to finish Frizzle Fry is the
band’s most accessible album, punctuated with catchy “hits” like “John The
Fisherman” and “Too Many Puppies”, yet it still displays the full Primus
portfolio. “Mr. Knowitall” and “Pudding
Time” contain all the irreverence you would expect from a band that created the
theme song for South Park and named a record Brown Album. “To Defy The
Laws of Tradition” and “Sathington Willoughby” play with tropes of gentlemanly
white male norms with which Primus often clash.
Bassist and singer Les Claypool bumps up against imagined histories in
much of his work and can be seen equally drawing inspiration from and usurping
ideas of any collective past we might share.
Things get slow and strange with “Frizzle Fry” and “The Toys Go Winding
Down” before Les turns brutally honest or scathingly cutting with “Spegetti Western”. All of this is wrapped in the bass-heavy
alternative punk-metal madness that made Primus so unique in 90s mainstream
heavy music.
The
middle stretch of this album contains a flurry of phenomenally groovy, catchy,
and intriguingly odd tracks. While “Too
Many Puppies” may have to bear the blame for Korn existing, it is an insanely
catchy and heavy stomper on an album that isn’t afraid to be direct. “Mr. Knowitall” continues this approach with
its pounding bassline, heavy guitar riff, and near perfect lyrics: “They call
me Mr. Knowitall/I am so eloquent./Perfection is my middle name/And whatever
rhymes with eloquent”. Up next is the
exquisitely judged “Frizzle Fry” which combines Les’ popping bass sound with
Larry LaLonde’s squealing guitar to maximum effect, and goes on to display the
unbelievable prog jamming talent of both them and Tim Alexander on drums. “John The Fisherman”, with its downright
memorable likeability, and “The Toys Go Winding Down”, imbued with foreboding
and creeping oddities, round up this flow of youthful and creative genius with
a reminder of the range of Primus. They
drew from all sorts of sources and allowed themselves to go in any direction
they wished.
If
you don’t know Primus, trying to describe their sound is particularly
tough. It’s like Frank Zappa, The
Stooges, Minutemen, and Metallica all mashed together, but delivered by a
bass-wielding genius who’s simultaneously voicing all the animal characters in
a twisted cartoon about what goes on when humans aren’t around. I once said to a friend about “Too Many
Puppies” that it made me want to strap a platypus to each foot and go stomping
around the pit. Sadly, I don’t think
this blog post does any better a job than that one sentence does of
encapsulating the bizarre and primal power of Primus. They can worm their way into your brain
almost against your will, and before long you’re hooked on the mutterings of
madmen, the basslines of faux-historical figures, and the unreal world of a
band who undoubtedly defy the laws of tradition.
Oh,
and I almost forgot… Primus sucks.
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