Album: The Audacity Of Hype
Artist: Jello Biafra And The Guantanamo School of Medicine
Genre: Hardcore Punk
Year: 2009
Label: Alternative Tentacles
[At the time of writing this you could still get this album for free on amazon. Times have changed though. It's still cheaper than most things in the MP3 store, but it's no longer free. Sorry.]
There are lots of Punk musicians, old and new, who are vital, interesting and worth your time and energy to look up. Some, however, need to pack it in. Where Jello Biafra falls at this point is ambiguous, but I’m beginning to think the man has had his time and needs to hang up the microphone for good.
Jello Biafra is certainly most famous for being the voice of the Dead Kennedy’s, one of the first overtly political Hardcore Punk bands and is, at this point, the only original member of the band who is still even close to artistically relevant. Since the break-up of the Dead Kennedy’s way back in the 80’s, Biafra has collaborated with numerous artists, started a spoken word career, been running Alternative Tentacles Records and generally tried to be a force in the political realm. But if you want to know about his political involvement, you can go read his Wikipedia page. I want to talk about his music.
I’ve had an odd relationship with Biafra’s music over the years. I enjoy the Dead Kennedy’s but in terms of classic Hardcore Punk bands, they’re far from my favorite (that’d probably be Black Flag) and I usually find myself listening to Biafra because he works with other artists I like, not because I just want to hear him. Examples of this include the first Lard album, which was Biafra collaborating with the Industrial Metal band Ministry, and the two albums he did with the Melvins as his backing band. With both Lard and the Melvins, Biafra was backed by heavy Metal music that seemed very appropriate to his political conspiracy ramblings. The boys from Ministry learned to play in a more punk-like style with Lard and the Melvins sounded like a sludgier version of Lard for the albums they did with him. All in all, both worked out pretty well.
Now, at 51 years of age, Biafra has formed a new band called The Guantanamo School of Medicine, which, aside from being a mouthful, is probably, the best backing band he’s ever worked with. Except for the Melvins, of course. Including Biafra himself, the band is a quintet consisting of Ralph Spight (of Victims Family) and Kimo Ball (of Freak Accident) on guitars, Jon Weiss (of Sharkbait) on drums and Billy Gould (of Faith No More) on bass. Of the musicians involved, I was only familiar with Gould before. So in a way, this unusual group of players was completely new to me. Further more, this is the first time since getting Fresh Fruit For Rotting Vegetables that I’ve gotten an album because of Biafra himself and not the band he’s working with.
The Guantanamo School of Medicine has released an album that lets you know right away, in no uncertain terms, that Biafra has not cooled with age and that he’ll be skewering politicians till the day he dies. All you have to do is look at the album’s cover, which features a devilish Biafra in the style of the famous Obama Hope poster and the album’s title under it, The Audacity of Hype, to get the picture: no one is safe from Jello.
Musically speaking, this is a surprisingly solid record. The School of Medicine essentially takes the best elements of the two best bands Biafra ever worked with by combining the speed, energy and punked out agitation of The Dead Kennedys with the mighty heaviness of the Melvins. The result is a classic Hardcore Punk sound with some serious weight behind it, and it sounds pretty good. Spight and Ball’s twin guitars are the stars of this show as they shred their way through all nine tracks with reckless abandon. Gould and Weiss make for a good rhythm team with Gould’s bass as the source of the weight that holds the music together. Their combined energy is manic and provides an excellent platform for Biafra to rant over. Yep. The Guantanamo School of Medicine is a fantastic Hardcore Punk Band and that’s the start of the problems.
Here’s what’s up: no new ground is being broken here. None. Sure the music is good, but we’ve essentially heard this before with the Melvins, with Lard and even with The Dead Kennedys. The Guantanamo School of Medicine is just another in a long line of Biafra’s backing bands and he has a way of infecting his bands so that they all sound similar. More than that, Biafra is getting old and his rants are too. This is umpteenth time I’ve heard him raving about how the politicians are corrupt, how 9/11 was an inside job and how consumerism sucks. All of that may be true (maybe,) but we’ve all heard him say it all before. The only thing that’s missing from that list is a reference to pedophile criminals or drug cartels… actually that second one might be in there, too.
In theory, there will always be new political conspiracies to get freaked out over, and so Biafra will always have new material, but at the moment, this all feels like re-hash. To cap all this off is the way the album ends. The last track “I Won’t Give Up” is 21 minutes long and is one of those annoying tracks that actually ends about six minutes in, leaving us in silence. After a while, the silence ends and the music starts again, but the secret track is actually all of the songs from the album being played all on top of each other which is just about as big of a waste of time as you can get. I remember when Mastodon did something similar at the end of Blood Mountain and I wasn’t happy with them either.
My final verdict on this album may surprise you though. Despite what I’ve just said, I’ve enjoyed this record for what it is, and that’s a solid Jello release. If you’re a fan of Mr. Biafra, then you’re going to like this no matter what I say and call me a hater for saying anything nasty about it at all. It may not take us anywhere new but it does provide us with a pretty fun time if you take it on musical merits alone. Also, you can get it for free at amazon.com, so if you don’t like it, you don’t have to feel bad for wasting money on it. However. This should be the end for Jello Biafra’s musical career. He’s proven that he can re-make a good record over and over again, so he needs to do something new next or hang it up. Besides, he’s not going to have time to be making music; he’s running for President with the Green Party in 2012. Lookout world. Here comes Jello.
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Irony: a man who fronted a band called "Dead Kennedys" running for office.
ReplyDeleteIt is strange...
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