New Music From FITTED, galen tipton
FITTED
First Fits
(ORG)
After decades, bassist Mike Watt—best known as a member of the legendary '80s punk group Minutemen—seems to be busier than ever in 2019.
In this year, he toured Europe over the summer as the bassist for Flipper, had a fall tour with his Missingmen band, and he played on new albums from Unknown Instructors (featuring Watt’s Minutemen and fIREHOSE bandmate George Hurley on drums and Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis on guitar), Jumpstarted Plowhards, Wish Granters, mssv (plus another album from mssv guitarist Mike Baggetta), and FITTED.
The group FITTED is particularly notable since it includes one important musical inspiration for the Minutemen: Graham Lewis, a key member of the British post-punk-and-beyond group Wire.
Lewis is still kicking ass in Wire after 43 years (their new album Mind Hive arrives next month) and also deserves attention for his lesser-known and more experimental work, including Dome (with Wire member Bruce Gilbert), which had its intriguing first four albums reissued this year by Editions Mego. Also in FITTED is guitarist Matthew Simms, who has been a member of Wire for the last decade, and drummer Bob Lee (of The Freeks and Fearless Leader).
Although FITTED was originally just intended to be a one-off project for Wire’s Drill Festival in Los Angeles in 2017, the quartet kept the spirit going to record its debut album, First Fits, over the last two years in Watt’s home base of San Pedro, California, Kent (England), and Lewis’s city of residence, Uppsala, Sweden.
What’s striking is the energy and enthusiasm that’s immediately evident from the album’s first tune, the 8-minute “Plug in the Jug” which, somewhat surprisingly, seems to channel the locomotive atmospherics of the '70s German band NEU!, with a relentless, driving beat, Watt’s minimal octave-separated bass line and thick, hovering guitar notes.
“Training Pit Bulls for the Navy” maintains the bristling vigor with Simms’s abrasive guitar tones and an agitated rhythm section, and the greyscale, noir-ish “The Legend of Lydmar Lucia” features Lewis reciting seemingly nonsense lyrics like “In the belly of the veil, a Hoover lap dance, accordingly swelling, trousers enhanced”; it makes more sense knowing that Lewis is actually providing an account of what he witnessed at a Stockholm art event in the '90s.
Lewis and Watt trade off vocal duties on the album, with Watt providing his folksy Watt-speak “spielin’” lyrics, like on “The Chunk That Got Chewed”, which dispel pretentiousness and offer a playful attitude. Among the album’s best tracks is the glowingly exuberant “Magically Blessed”, driven by Lee’s animated drumming with percolating synth flourishes, sizzling guitar lines and a potent rock ending.
With long and fruitful careers, Lewis and Watt refuse to rest on their laurels, and First Fits is evidence of that, expressing a true joy of creation with expansive, genuinely stirring rock numbers.
galen tipton
fake meat
(Orange Milk)
This writer is not going to lie; he was genuinely surprised to see the debut album from 100 gecs—a highly entertaining and insane, warped barrage of pop/hip-hop shards that most people would likely find to be unlistenable and intensely obnoxious—on several year-end “best of 2019” lists, including the one from Rolling Stone magazine, sticking out like a token minority in a corporation’s promotional photo.
This critic doesn’t want to deny 100 gecs the attention—quite the contrary. He would be absolutely tickled to see lots of year-end lists packed full of batsh*t-crazy, weirdo freakazoid music from the no-audience underground, a self-supporting brethren liberated from commercial viability.
Which brings us to Columbus, Ohio artist galen tipton’s latest album fake meat, which has a similar audacity of being so militantly and hilariously capricious, and in a bizarro, alternate universe, it could’ve been some surprise hit.
Here, thousands of sound fragments and mini-explosions are each screaming for attention, while tracks change directions seemingly every second.
The sheer amount of information to process here is almost oppressive; in violent contrast with that is a bright, colorful and youthful aesthetic, with a touch of wide-eyed innocence. Imagine binge-eating Lisa Frank posters and projectile vomiting rainbows while being stabbed in the earholes with sharpened candy canes.
Several tracks on fake meat are collaborations with like-minded artists, including Seth Graham, Koeosaeme, and others, with constructive interplay, like “Touch” (with Holly Waxwing and Giant Claw) which functions like a manic, musical relay race, with a melodic “baton” being quickly passed from instrument to instrument (or sampler).
“Pillow Fight” has a paradoxically intense lightness, with crystalline sounds, flutes, and bells delivered with a machine-gun ecstasy. The odd whimsy of “Puddles” mixes clarinets with field recordings of children, evoking joy with a complicated, unconventional approach, as much of fake meat does.