So they just sorta showed up out of
nowhere like a year or so ago, I think, and started playing shows and
confusing people and getting all weird. I semi-accidentally stumbled
into a gig they played at Nietzsche's over the summer and they were
wailing out on guitars and wearing costumes and brandishing big
phallic props and it was like “Wow this is a complete assault on
the senses and the psyche.” And a friend who'd seen them before
was, afterward, all like “I think they held back a little tonight,”
and I was all like “No I don't think they did? Did they?”
Well Worn Boot is an overall overload
of loud rock music and over-the-top stage antics, and watching them
that night I kept thinking, “Well all this stuff is certainly well
and good, and it's largely visual and psychotic-looking, and I'm not
sure precisely what parts of me are aroused right now but some of
them are.” But I sort of felt like, “But also, even without the
theatrics, the music itself is really awesome and all these guys are
real awesome at their instruments, even though they presumably have
probably about 750mL of whiskey running around each of their bodies,
I bet it would sound super good even if my eyes and convoluted sex
bits weren't involved.”
And now the band has a record out. And
being a band strapped to their own bizarre mythos/ performance piece
(drunk sage journeyman singer/flutist Plainsman, half-human
half-cardboard-animal guitarist Horse, B-movie horror monster drummer
Billy Klubb, and I-just-don't-even-know masked psycho bassist Baby Buckingham), it of course comes with a comic book. It turns out my initial
premonition was correct: the band sounds really awesome on tape. The
EP, Fully Torqued, is five tracks of big unapologetic rock that
just straight up bleeds Fuck You attitude. Like if Johnny Cash and
Captain Beefheart got all gay on each other one night and had a baby
that grew up in the post glam metal 80s, and Jethro Tull fluffed that
night, because, of course, there's a flute player in the band. It's a
blender of American genres, with heavy doses of Blues and Metal and
Surf and Country-Western, even hitting some Beach Goth/Sea Chanty
notes, for instance, in the verses of “Jack the Ripper.”
“Big Bad Dick” kicks it off with a
Dude Ranch snare march and ominous guitar riff, with the verse:
“Now let me tell you a story about my
big bad dick/ it's large, in charge, gonna make you sick/ so come on
over with that big fat ass and make that body bend/ I done told you
once you sonofabitch, I'm the best that's ever been.”
The uber-punchy flute jam “Ballad of
Billy Klubb” follows, and the next fifteen or so minutes are a
rompous foray, at once straight-forward and challenging, danceable
and sexually confounding, and just plain fun. So basically, the Rock
and Roll is perfect.
The comic itself tells the band's
origin story, and spoiler alert, there's a chase scene and it turns
out Plainsman learned how to play the flute by sucking dick. So.
Fully Torqued captures a band
that doesn't NEED to go around on stage brandishing huge dildos. But it's awesome that they do. And I guess we didn't need to get this
wordy about a band that plays loud riffs and humps each other on
stage? Did we?
Pick up a copy this Friday and have a good time.
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