Yes, twenty year stoner rock veterans Monster Magnet are still around, and yes, their megaton dope n’ roll still glitters and shakes, so put on your tinfoil pants and swallow your purple pills because the mastermind himself, Dave Wyndorf, is still preaching volcanic decadence from high atop his asteroid throne. Sure, the third dimension apocalyptic vision still dominates the Monster Magnet narrative, and sure, they’ve still got their tongues wrapped around the live wires coming out the back of the cosmic boogie machine, but that just means their sonic, silver riffs still roll over you like a marching army of radioactive spacemen with exploding balls. Nobody does Monster Magnet like Monster Magnet, baby, and it’s still the best and it’s still bad-ass.
Check out the video for “Gods and Punks” from Mastermind!
You should see it around here, man. It’s all exploding hearts and raging boners and hot sparks, which kind of sounds like a sweaty Saturday night at the steel mill, but really it’s just me on cloud nine in the rock n’ roll sky that opened up above me the second I dropped the needle on this glorious slab of coke bottle clear wax. A new C’mon record can, without much effort at all, make your entire life worth living, so the fact that it’s been three years since their last full-length, Bottled Lightning of an All Time High, means we’ve been comatose for quite awhile now. But here comes our heroic power trio, Sir Ian Blurton, Katie Lynn Campbell, and Dean Dallas Bentley, riding in on this pale horse to save the fucking day, to shock us back into coherence with their brilliantly boss fuzz n’ roll. Beyond the Pale Horse, then, is like a shot of adrenaline right into your balls, like most C’mon albums are, naturally, and like previous albums, its beauty lies in its beastly nature, its ability to shift and deviate while still remaining furiously savage. The play this time is that the electric noise is saturated in dreamy effects, and C’mon mixes some foggy, psychedelic magic in amongst their usual motor-driven madness. Dig the catchy title track and the majestically groovy – and unusually long – “Fortress of the Night” for the freakiest examples. But for sheer riffola, “Midnite is the Answer,” with its stoner crunch, is the one that pumps my blood. C’mon prove, once again, that they are almighty and untouchable.
*That’s not the record I own, but it looks just like it. Courtesy of whomever took the pic. It might’ve been Tony.
Ok, I don’t have an mp3 from the album to share (I just got it in the mail), so go buy the album from Yeah Right! to hear it for yourself. In the meantime, enjoy an older C’mon video of them washing their van and kicking it live!
I just got my wife to sew an Early Man patch on one of my jackets, which is some pinpoint timing, man, because here’s the long awaited new album from Conte & Co. And I do mean long. It’s been five years since their debut full-length, Closing In, and the only thing they’ve bothered to grace us with since that time is 2008′s four song EP, Beware the Circling Fin. But chances are you’re not going to find grace high on the Early Man priority list, especially when there’s a fistful o’ slacking, riffing, and thrashing to reign down on the masses. Death Potion, then, is a full-blooded metal album, the kind of nasty, skate or die, no life ’til leather, parking lot party you grew up puking to, and if I wasn’t losing my hair I’d immediately start growing it out just so I could shave it all off underneath (I believe it’s called “The Newsted”) and run around with balls full of toxic semen, smashing booze bottles and shaving cats. Every one of the twelve songs on the album spray havoc at you like a machine gun in the hands of a disgruntled classmate in a Megadeth shirt and Conte’s genuinely wretched, oft-shrill vox sounds like it’s pouring straight out of a Trans Am tape deck. Despite its obvious nostalgic power, Death Potion is still an anthem for today’s militia of misanthropic youth. That means YOU, Jack, ’cause I’m losing my hair, so go get wasted and blow something up.
Monster Magnet
C’mon
Early Man