Fat Randy's Triumphant sophomore release: Slow, Incremental Change.
My generation was the biggest waste of 9/11 I’m not worth Thirty thousand fuckin’ dollars
I thought Fat Randy was trying to sneak a Ronald Reagan photo past me by slipping it with a prog Jazz-rock fusion masterpiece, but my eyes ARE too keen, my instinct too strong. you get a 5 for effort guys, and a 0 for target... Here's a solid 10 for the music though. Where have Fat Randy been hiding from me all this time? Their 2017 debut "Reggaenomics" should have put them on my radar, but I was busy exploring other realms of music completely unrelated to the Butthole Surfers-meet-Primus vibes that they had going on at the time. Fast forward to today, when they've been pneumatically nailed to my radar screen, their sound seems to have developed a more noticeable Jazz slant to it that inevitably sparks memories of The Mothers of Invention added on top of the previous two vibes, though no doubt the band would sooner quote Steely Dan as inspo (and with good reason, iIll admit), mine are the ears and the brain what digest their fascinating produce.
If it gets both heady and weird, it's not just the Steely Dan juice still running through the band's collective brain, but also a product of their inception as a house-gig band for college pukes in Connecticut University, where they gained traction and perhaps the liquid courage to go ahead and record a debut album released near the end of 2017- The aforementioned "Reggaenomics" was quite heavy, to the point of dipping its toes into sludge, but driven slightly uptempo by an innate -and fitting- punkish malcontenteness. Though my description may make it sound like an unprofessional and unpolished mess, the truth is that "Reggaenomics" is anything but. There's plenty of rhyme and reason to its madness, and the exceptional musicianship of each bandmember is chief. Definitely worth a listen or ten.
The early College days of the band made for a filthy, DIY, and slightly nihilistic sound. A perfect balance of iconoclastic intellectualism and tawdry stoner prose alike, two opposing forces stretching the band's musical confines beyond any real labels and genres, crossing over instead into early 90s outsider psychedelia and the underground nastiness of obscure punk Zines. Music to read R.Crumb comics to if you will, and it gets weirder from there, apparently, the band had taken to "waterboarding their drummer with scalding hot tea." among other oddities. Absolutely no chill, as the kids say. Their second LP was in the works when that-which-shall-not-be-mentioned struck the world with an almost complete cessation of public activity. Lives were lost, lockdowns were placed and the rich became richer still. All of this sidelined the tentative sequel to their debut and instead allowed the band to focus their effort on an entirely different direction, a side project of sorts titled "(Randy) Alex G" which isn't just the title of this new album, but the name of an almost entirely different band composed of exactly the same individuals as Fat Randy. In a way "(Randy) Alex G" wasn't their sophomore, it was a re-debut as a different live act and everything, one that's apparently still active to this day, as a sort of alter-ego to the main Randy guys. "(Randy) Alex G" was released via CoffinFlop Records, and it's described as "a satirical collection of bedroom pop that dually serves as a love letter to the sounds endemic to Greater New England DIY and whose cloying and idiotic, but undeniably catchy and lyrical songs acted as something of a “musical Trojan Horse” to essentially hoodwink those uninitiated to the band’s de facto style." This record debuted this very year and while musically excellent, its tongue-in-cheek lyricism is rather evident from the get-go. This does not detract from its face-value enjoyment, however, and instead serves as a reinforcement of the eternal identity of the band's members as sardonic and iconoclastic bards.
When That-which-shall-not-be-named came to pass (sort of?), it came time to finish with Fat Randy's true sophomore piece, which today we know as "Slow, Incremental Change" and which very recently debuted shortly after its half-brother album. Once again does Fat Randy Ride with heavy riffs and psychedelic Saxophonics in an intricate and febrile musical proposal that swings between space-stoner rock, Acid Jazz, and bouts of surrealist punk. Even the album's art seems to echo all of these aesthetics all at once, superimposing a highly distorted and downright horrifying photograph of American State power couple Ronald and Nancy Reagan over an overly cosmic and trippy desert nightscape. Though visually set in the desert, the album could only be the product of extremely fertile minds and deft, caretaker hands. At once evoking images of a sweaty Datura trip and a sober look of a mess that needs picking up, "Slow, Incremental Change" is filled with somewhat cryptic if not allegorical passages of capitalist dissatisfaction and post-ironic anti-consumerism, framed through personal accounts of the hardships a soul endures in the information-polluted and drug-abundant wasteland that is modernity, where trauma and escapism meet in a deadly alliance. Though they've kept things reasonably light-hearted so far, SIC represents a bit of a shift for the band, as the almost 5 years between their debut and this new album make themselves felt through the gravity of its dark aphorisms. The Album follows a single character that loosely represents three people's journeys, namely that of frontman and main songwriter Stephen Friedland as well as two of his friends who met tragic ends.“Candidly, I don’t know if this is necessarily conveyed well on the album, but the act of having finished writing this is so relieving because it represents, to me, the final purge of the feelings of profound guilt I internalized for my friends, seeing so much of myself in them and feeling like I could’ve done so much more to help, feeling like I didn’t deserve to live instead of them; and the feelings of suicidality that generally governed my life for so long,”says Friedland.
In every regard, Fat Randy's "Slow, Incremental Change" is very complex, but it's far from inaccessible. When its lyrics feel more arcane, such as with "Soup For My Family", "Smarter Child" or "Alice Window" is when perhaps one should shut off the analytical part of your mind to let the song find its own meaning through the senses and the emotional, and there will be no lack of stimulation for either thanks to the heavy guitars and lofty saxophone riffs that join in a pincer attack on the listener's perception. The overall album is composed of highly experimental jazzy bridges and groovy metal-adjacent backings behind sullen grungy verses - You won't find a forgettable moment or dull filler in the entirety of the album, even the purely instrumental intro is worth a double or triple replay thanks to its high quality (and sadly short duration.) Overall, It seems like a giant leap in the right direction for the band, one that's rather surprising given the already extraordinary character of their debut which hardly seemed to have left any room for "improvement", yet somehow, Fat Randy managed to outdo themselves by evolving into a more complex and surrealist sound.
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