I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: LES CLAYPOOL-Of Fungi and Foe (2009).

Claypool was asked to score a video game called The Spore Wars and, at around the same time, to score a movie called Pig Hunt.  According to the liner notes of the disc, he used the templates that he made for the scores and fleshed them out to make this album.

This was the first Claypool solo album I’d bought in several years (since 2002’s Purple Onion).  I’d heard “Mushroom Men” on the radio and really liked it, so I decided to get the disc.  And I have to say overall I’m a little disappointed.

Now, I’ve been a Primus fan for years (I even saw them right after Suck on This) so I know what I’m getting with Les.  And yet, maybe I don’t anymore.  The disc is very percussion heavy, with lots of rather long songs.  And although I love long songs, I love long songs that aren’t the same thing for 6 or so minutes.  I also rather miss Claypool’s voice.  He doesn’t sing a lot of these songs in his typical falsetto.  There’s a lot of very deep voiced, rather processed sounding voices here (it works great on the muh muh muh muhshroom men, but not so great elsewhere).  Because when you combine that with the bass and percussion, it’ really hard to hear what he’s on about (and Claypool lyrics are half the fun).

Plus, we know that with Primus’ own brand of weirdness, a little goes a long way.  So, hearing the same bizarro riff for 4 minutes can be trying.

Despite the criticisms, the disc is good in small doses.  The first 4 tracks are all really solid.  But that 5th track, “What would George Martin Do?” just sucks all the life out of the disc.  The same goofy riff for 6 minutes with completely unintelligible lyrics.  Ouch.   But “You Can’t Tell Errol Anything” picks up the pace somewhat with a wonderful Tom Waits-ian soundtrack.  The addition of Eugene Hutz on insane wailing vocals brings a wonderful new level of dementia to the disc.

Throughout the disc there some amazing bass riffs (of course) and some really cool effects thrown onto the bass (and other instruments).  But the overall feel of the disc is just too samey.  I think the music would probably work really well as soundtrack music, but it lacks a little something by itself.

I’m not suggesting that Claypool needs to be more poppy, because that’s hardly it (although he does have an amazing gift for clever hooks), but it’s possible that he needs an editor.  Was that the role Ler played in Primus?  Who will ever know?

[READ: February 5, 2010] Diario de Oaxaca

Wa-HA-Ca (that’s how you pronounce Oaxaca (the first question I had)).

I ordered this book for our Spanish collection without really knowing what it was about.  When it arrived I had a hard time deciding where to catalog it…is it a graphic novel?  a biography?  It’s bilingual so does it even go in the Spanish collection, which has much less circulation than our English collection?  As I flipped though the book, it looked really cool, so I decided to just read it and figure it out for myself.

Peter Kuper is, among other things, the drawer of Mad Magazine’s Spy vs Spy since about 1997.  Sometime in 2006, Kuper decided to go on sabbatical from the politics of George W. Bush.  He and his family packed up and moved to Oaxaca, Mexico for two years.  While he was there, the city experienced a semi-annual teacher’s strike.  However, this particular strike turned bloody when the President of Oaxaca turned his soldiers against the strikers.

News around the world talked about the daily dangers in Oaxaca.  But aside from that initial confrontation, things for Kuper were fairly safe.  He felt compelled to keep a diary of what was really happening as opposed to what the papers were reporting–not that there wasn’t danger and violence, but that it was far less lawless than the media reported.

Later, once the hostilities subsided, Kuper found himself enjoying everything about Oaxaca (except for scorpions in his shoes). He even got to go with his daughter to the location where the millions of monarch butterflies congregate every year.

The bulk of the book is an amazing”sketchbook” of his stay there.  I put the word in quotes because this is so far beyond what I think of as a sketchbook.  Kuper uses colored pencils and what I assume are watercolors to fill in the sketches.  And the scenes his creates are, honestly, beautiful.

There are some great examples of the political protest (with cool collage effects), there’s a ton of bugs littering the pages (I gather there are a lot of bugs on Oaxaca), and wonderful renderings of local natural scenes and monuments.  It’s really incredible and it bears multiple viewings.

The books ends with an amusing cartoon (running several pages) called “Going for a Last Walk” and it summarizes the scenes in his neighborhood and what the feral creatures also get up to.

This book is probably not getting a lot of attention (it’s on a small press and, since the title appears to be in Spanish, it’s English-language market will be limited).  But, lest you be afraid of the book, the entire thing is bilingual (and there’s really not a lot of text…it’s mostly pictures).  The book is neither aggressively political, nor is it overtly personal.  It’s a very strong blend of a man trying to grapple with things going on around him.  And, we’re fortunate enough that Kuper always carries his pencils with him.

So, hunt for this book, it’s absolutely worth looking at.

By the way, we decided to catalog it as 917.2