About three years ago the dastardly duo of Jared Warren and Coady Willis brought in Toshi Kasai on guitar to, I suppose, fill out the Big Business sound. Frankly, I didn’t think there was anything Big Business needed to do because the heavy racket created by the bass and drums of Warren and Willis, respectively, was colossally fuzzy and beyond reproach. Well, now they’ve added a second guitarist, Scott Martin (400 Blows, Crom), to the payroll, giving this hydra one more head, and while the implications are this makes the beast all the more ferocious, it’s not entirely the case. What the four songs on this new EP, Quadruple Single (released on their own Gold Metal Records label), offer are heightened dynamics and structure, which, when talking about Big Business, might not inspire much confidence. However, Big Business are, and always will be, ruthless ogres, and so long as Warren continues to sing like he’s gnawing on the skull of every sweaty, bleeding-ear drunkard in the front row, you won’t have reason to lose confidence in ‘em. The band is at their best when they’re pummeling you black and bruised with thick cudgels of sludge, and there’s plenty of that kind of low-end love on board here, especially on “City Ham” and “Guns” (‘Guns are better than everything else!’). If anything, all the fret-raping screeches and squeals take some getting used to, and while “Always Never Know When to Quit” contains a turbulently gorgeous melody and “Ice-Cold War” places an unusual emphasis on the riff, they don’t reach through the speakers and tear your head from your neck. Big Business songs used to do that. At least half of ‘em do here; the others just slap you around a bit.
The brothers Bird, the oft-shirtless duo from Illinois or outer-space, I can’t remember which, have returned with a proper full-length (as opposed to 2008′s seven-song Reservations), self-titled and much ado about everything. The knotty fuzz Tweak Bird is able to strangle out of drums and a baritone guitar is impressively grotesque; pair that with gamma ray vocals, some saxophone and flute, an appropriate obsession with Marc Bolan, and the knob-noodlin’ skills of the Deaf Nephews (Dale Crover of Melvins and Toshi Kasai of Big Business) and you get ten heavy, spacey, progressive pop blasts influenced by all the necessary evils. Tweak Bird’s design is such that they eliminate the need to linger, spoof glam over jam, and even though they offer two of their longest songs to date (“A Sun/Ahh Ahh” and “Distant Airways”), they still microwave the hell out of the stoner mandate and stomp all over the stardust. This album is as weird as it is wonderful — an outlier, a rare breed.
Check out the videos for “Lights in Lines” and “A Sun/Ahh Ahh” from Tweak Bird!
With the addition of guitarist Toshi Kasai for Mind the Drift, Big Business became a three-piece, but they really made a name for themselves as a two-piece, so consider this another notch in the beard for the mighty duos. Now, I don’t just love Big Business because I share the same last name with bassist/vocalist Jared Warren, or because Warren and drummer Coady Willis are now fixtures for the mega-awesome kings of stoner fuzz, Melvins, but those reasons certainly don’t hurt. No, what I love most about Big Business is that, musically speaking, they portage the terrain of mountainous sound with crooked backs and bleeding hands, stopping only to feast on the raw buffalo carcasses scattered along the way. I’ve always dug the crushing, and at times melodious, sludge n’ fuzz of Big Business and I still dig it, even if they have added a guitar to the arsenal.
Big Business
Tweak Bird
#14 Big Business – Mind the Drift