If you were a twitchy, punky little sniveling pre-adolescent at the turn of the millennium like I was, your very first experience with Primus was likely either the South Park theme song or the first two minutes of "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver" off of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, which you probably played obsessively like some dumbass kid deluding himself into believing that he's really into skate culture. Even though, of course, trying to skateboard was really tiring for your puny atrophied-from-video-games preteen body, and the clothing and accessories associated with skate culture were sort of lame, and a lot of the ska punk music associated with the scene sucked four butts. That's a little harsh; maybe half a butt, actually.
Primus is definitely not a band associated with skate culture either, which makes the inclusion of "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver" into a genre-pioneering skateboarding video game odd in retrospect, but nevertheless I can't help but bring myself back to 1999-2000 when listening to Sailing the Seas of Cheese. Never 1991, of course, like I'm supposed to, but in my defense I was three years old at the time and shitting myself constantly. Now I'm 29 and shitting myself constantly. Heyo!
With Sailing the Seas of Cheese, Primus have stepped it up a little. Major-label debut, and by now they must have garnered all the money they could ever need to make an album exactly the way the wanted to without having to mooch off of Claypool's poor ol' dad anymore. Claypool's bass is still the star of the show, and at this point it's a goddamned prima donna. Trust me, it's nigh on impossible to remember anything LaLonde plays on lead guitar throughout the record unless you actually go back and force yourself to focus on it. But don't worry about that for now, because the bass playing on this album is demonstratively more technical and, for lack of a better word, interesting than the bass playing on Frizzle Fry. "Interesting" in the sense that sometimes the notes fly by so fast that it doesn't even really sound like bass, at least not like practically utilized bass that you'd find in rock music. I'm not calling the bass playing in Frizzle Fry boring, idiot! Anyway, trust me, you won't even think about the lead guitar much either when listening to this album. The other thing I'll say about Sailing the Seas of Cheese is that it seems to be more pop-oriented than its predecessor with shorter songs on average. Minor step-ups aside, this album is still very much familiar territory. You get more of Claypool's same crazy high-pitched twangy voice, more of the same weirdness, and more of the same humor. Pure, unadulterated, unrefined, uncircumcised Primus for your listening "pleasure".
More of the same isn't a negative, of course, this shit rules pretty hard with respect to musicianship and competence, and it's still an experience unlike anything you could get from any other band in existence. Just don't expect anything profound, or blissfully cathartic, or emotionally life-changing. And especially not right away, either. This is meant to be funky and fun, this isn't church. Or mosque. Or synagogue. Or whatever place of worship you choose to guiltily avoid in your life.
Sailing the Seas of Cheese begins with a quick minimalist upright bass introduction that sounds to me like it's culling visions of the rollicking waves of an open ocean, appropriately enough, with its hypnotizing "chuuuuuuuug chug-chug chug-chug chug-chug-chug chuuuuuuuug" rhythm. Claypool invites you to "Come with us/We'll sail the seas of cheese" before launching into the first proper song, "Here Come the Bastards", which sounds like some weirdo waltz in 5/4 time. And then most of the rest of the album kind of keeps sounding like weirdo waltzes in odd time signatures if you ask me, with quick-hitting staccato notes flying in all directions. "Sgt. Baker" is actually more of a weirdo march, with politically-charged lyrics from the point of view of a drill sergeant satirically expressing his role in the military ("I will rape your personality/Pummel you with my own philosophy/Strip you of your self-integrity/To make you all a bit like me"). I imagine it's meant to be commentary on the war in the Middle East. No, the other one. "American Life" is actually more of a weirdo groove, with politically-charged lyrics hyperbolically singing the praises of the American dream ("Bob is an unemployed veteran/Born and bred in the South Bronx/He's living off the streets down in east L.A./Residing in a cardboard box"). Ah, so now there actually appears to be an actual message to these words. Maybe it's not fun and games after all? Whatever happened to the bygone days of "TOO MANY PUUUUUUUPPIES!" and songs about crackheads? Oh wait, there's still more of the album to go.
The aforementioned "Jerry Was a Race Car Driver" is my favorite song on this album. A very funky, memorable bassline and a solid solo from LaLonde that you can actually hear! The song tells two unrelated tales: one of Jerry, the reckless race car driver who drank and drove himself into a telephone pole at the age of 22, and one of Captain Pierce, a fireman who was pushed into retirement at the age of 65. There's no subtext to the lyrics except maybe the underlying lesson to live like one and not the other. BUT WHICH IS WHICH?! Pretty clever, you saucy lads.
"Eleven" is in 11/8 time, hence its name, but I doubt you would even notice since it's another big ol' herk-a-ma-jerk. "Is It Luck?" is a high-speed, repetitive exercise in extreme herky-jerky endurance. See the pattern? It's a little grating in the wrong mood, but there's no better example of virtuosity on the album, and possibly the rest of the Primus discography for that matter. Even the vocal breakdown near the end showcases a quick-tongued Claypool showing off his flow in a way that would make mile-a-minute rappers such as Busdriver a tinge envious (probably not, but I just wanted to be the first person to ever namedrop Busdriver in a Primus review). I love the way, lightning-quick, he just runs through "No no-no-no no-no no-no no-no-no no-no no-no no-no-no!" like he says it everyday. He probably does!
The last half of Sailing the Seas of Cheese follows a familiar structure if you're well-acquainted with Frizzle Fry: a few fully fleshed-out songs, a couple of short, transitional vignette-type tracks ("Grandad's Little Ditty", featuring an old man singing in the shower and now the second album in a row to use the phrase "pull the pud", and "Sathington Waltz", an instrumental follow-up to the Frizzle Fry's "Sathington Willoughby"), and a closer that reprises the first proper song on the album ("Los Bastardos"). "Tommy the Cat" features Tom Waits as the voice of the titular character (how about that eh?) while Claypool shows off more of his fast-as-fuck spoken word prowess.
The last two proper songs harken back to the slower, groovier, moodier tunes off of Frizzle Fry. "Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers" has yet more social commentary about drug use among the working class. You can probably tell by now that Claypool's upbringing was a very rural, heartland of America average Joe experience (he and LaLonde were raised in upstate California, after all, with Alexander being from North Carolina). I get a kick out of phrases like "Now the union boys are there/To protect us from all the corporate type/While Curious George's drug patrol/Is out here hunting snipe", with Curious George likely a reference to Bush Sr. and his War on Drugs push. Subtle commentary like this shows that the redneck Primus boys have some wits about them for sure. "Fish On (Fisherman Chronicles, Chapter II" continues the theme of Frizzle Fry's "John the Fisherman" and Claypool's love of fishing with a nearly 8-minute epic autobiographical tale about the open sea. Sounds positively folksy, right? Except the tune is ominous and foreboding, and the final two minutes have a killer bass breakdown, possibly down-tuned, signifying the tense moments when a giant fish is snagged and getting reeled in. Moby Dick is 8,000 pages, "Fish On" is 8 minutes, take your pick.
Most reviews you'll find will consider Sailing the Seas of Cheese the pièce de résistance of Primus' catalog, and it's a moot point for now since I still have six more studio albums to review (it will be seven more on 9/29/17 when their ninth album The Desaturating Seven drops), but it's easy to understand why people feel this way. It's a thoroughly accomplished effort by a band who works together well and plays off each other well. They've cultivate a truly unique sound that hasn't yet been duplicated, not really (Buckethead comes close, but he's a contemporary, not a successor, and he and Claypool have collaborated extensively anyway). The problem as I see it lies in the dreaded slippery slope of "technicality to the point of numbness" that is all too common in bands with a progressive bent. Yes, Primus are showing off a bit more here than they were before, but the added proficiency yields a very samey-sounding record as an end product. The first half suffers especially, with an endless bombardment of quick-note basslines it sounds like mush for a while until things settle into place and click. Once it clicks it's good, but don't ask me what "Eleven" sounds like because I've heard it 100 times and I still don't remember. It makes for an enjoyable listen, but it's only in the moment. Frizzle Fry has the narrow edge over Sailing the Seas of Cheese in my opinion; seek the debut for a tastier, meatier package. Or something. That's the kind of buzzphrase dipshittery that online music reviews are supposed to end with, you know.
GOOD
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