Commodore Charlie – Glass Party
Well, rock music and drugs failed to save the hippies or change the world in any meaningful way. Mostly it just left drug-addled casualties waking the world. The more extreme forms of rock promised some form of revolution, but they left leather-decked folks with immense beer bellies roaming the streets and the artists making the sounds happy to build mansions off their ticket stubs.
What we’re left with is humour, at least. Rock, even at its most aggressive, seems to need to include a bit of comedy ’cause. Frankly, we now know that the big rock characters of old didn’t really mean it. Hey, I’m sure Tom Morello must be sipping cocktails in his bathtub as we speak.
Commodore Charlie treads down that route very convincingly. They can rock out, produce some great grooves and they’re pretty funny. This would be bar fight music if the conflict was taking part in a Jack Black comedy. Still, it’s might catchy and groovy just the same.
Firetail – Aphex
Do you know how a drummer writes down his/her dreams? In dots and Xs. Thank you, Las Vegas!
Bad comedy aside, Firetail’s Aphex is the aforementioned drummer’s dream set to reel tape. Rhythm plays the starring role here. But, worry not, this is not merely a project directed by an overly excited snare drum player in a High School marching band. There is great inventiveness to the arrangements that the mechanics of pop vocals would likely have just robbed it of.
Aphex sounds like Fela Kuti taking his extended musical family down to a 90s disco where they spread chemical refreshments on participants like a fairy sprinkles magic dust. Don’t get the wrong idea, though. These are no mere psychedelic experiments either.
Instead, this is music played by highly skilled musicians who still want to showcase their training even when playing at their funkiest. It’s prog-rock made for the disco. It’s Scrabble played in a foreign language. With that being said, practically, no lick here is boring or sounds out of place.
