Never forget, Flipper died for your sins. There exists different categories of heaviness in the rock genre. Some bands are super fast heavy, others very slow, and some are just angry heavy. Flipper is "the bus is on fire heavy." Not quite punk, not quite metal, not quite anything tangible except as a long twisted spiral into the decrepit pits of a crude oil wasteland. Flipper is one of the first bands to come out of the San Francisco punk scene and even then no one knew what the hell to do with them. They would play so slow that the mosh-heads would try and fight them. And they would commonly blow out their speakers from the unfathomable amount of feedback. They were the rag tag group of maniacs that would change punk rock from being just about speed and politics into a thousand other sub genres and new areas of music, from grunge to emo to lo-fi. The name alone sparks fear in the hearts of lesser bands and their graffiti icon of the Flipper fish has been spotted all the way in China. The name originates from first frontman, Ricky Williams (later of the Sleepers), who while tripping on acid with the band found a beached whale at night and ran around screaming "they killed Flipper." He would later name all of his twenty pets Flipper because that was the only way he would ever be able to remember any of their names. This is their first full length album and it is a dozy. Slow, menacing riffs; bashful and maleficent drumming, and the bass is just red hot fuzz. The lyrics are nihilistic, harsh, and brutally honest in the delivery. This is not fun punk... or so they will lead you to initially believe. Sex Bomb is hilarious - an eight minute foray into the punk jazz established in the Fun House by the Stooges. The same words yelled over and over again - cathartic beauty. This is an album that takes punk and pulls it inside out to look at what makes it tick. No one comes back from listening to Flipper the same way. A classic I used to listen to all the time in high school, my old roommate described it as the music you listen to when you want to set a car on fire. If there ever existed the perfect riot music, it is Flipper.
Flipper - Generic Flipper
Never forget, Flipper died for your sins. There exists different categories of heaviness in the rock genre. Some bands are super fast heavy, others very slow, and some are just angry heavy. Flipper is "the bus is on fire heavy." Not quite punk, not quite metal, not quite anything tangible except as a long twisted spiral into the decrepit pits of a crude oil wasteland. Flipper is one of the first bands to come out of the San Francisco punk scene and even then no one knew what the hell to do with them. They would play so slow that the mosh-heads would try and fight them. And they would commonly blow out their speakers from the unfathomable amount of feedback. They were the rag tag group of maniacs that would change punk rock from being just about speed and politics into a thousand other sub genres and new areas of music, from grunge to emo to lo-fi. The name alone sparks fear in the hearts of lesser bands and their graffiti icon of the Flipper fish has been spotted all the way in China. The name originates from first frontman, Ricky Williams (later of the Sleepers), who while tripping on acid with the band found a beached whale at night and ran around screaming "they killed Flipper." He would later name all of his twenty pets Flipper because that was the only way he would ever be able to remember any of their names. This is their first full length album and it is a dozy. Slow, menacing riffs; bashful and maleficent drumming, and the bass is just red hot fuzz. The lyrics are nihilistic, harsh, and brutally honest in the delivery. This is not fun punk... or so they will lead you to initially believe. Sex Bomb is hilarious - an eight minute foray into the punk jazz established in the Fun House by the Stooges. The same words yelled over and over again - cathartic beauty. This is an album that takes punk and pulls it inside out to look at what makes it tick. No one comes back from listening to Flipper the same way. A classic I used to listen to all the time in high school, my old roommate described it as the music you listen to when you want to set a car on fire. If there ever existed the perfect riot music, it is Flipper.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment