Masters of Reality / Raging Slab

MASTERS OF REALITY

Sunrise On The Sufferbus (Chrysalis)

RAGING SLAB

Dynamite Monster Boogie Concert (Def American)

Melody Maker, 1992

by Simon Reynolds

So many bands today like to pretend that punk never died; I

can't see how this stance is somehow less regressive than bands who

pretend punk never happened. At the very least, you can't accuse

Masters Of Reality and Raging Slab of opportunism: they plonked

themselves in the boogie zone long before the likes of Black Crowes

and Alice In Chains made such revisionism profitable.

Defiantly out-of-time, Masters Of Reality are consummate blues

rock classicists. On songs like "She Got Me" and "J.B.  Witchdance"

their jive'n'roll ploughs an irresistible furrow midway between

Sabbath and Cream.  Their wondrous blend of nimble and ponderous owes

a lot to veteran Cream sticksman Ginger Baker's crisp, exquisitely

weighted drumming. "Ants In The Kitchen" and "Tilt-A-Whirl" have the

sculptural, slow-mo quality of ZZ Top at their weirdest: a

parodoxical fusion of bulk and grace, like a balletic hippo.  But

Masters Of Reality also do gorgeous, plaintive ballads, like the

breathless, breathtaking devotional "Jody Sings". My personal fave is

the slow-burning groove of "T.U.S.A.", on which Ginger Cockney-drawls

a heart-felt protest against the Yanks' inability to make a decent

cuppa. And he's spot-on: they bring you a teabag and a pot of warm

water, "but boiling it isn't/so tea you have not." His expatriate's

lament ("we need tea/to set us free") certainly speaks to me.

Raging Slab are as turgid and turbulent as their name promises.

Like Masters, they were rehabilitating boogie long before it was

fashionable or fiscally viable: their debut "Assmaster" (what a

title!) came out in '87.  Apparently, they're former art-punks who

turned themselves into white trash in the ultimate downwardly mobile

manoevure.  Now under Rick Rubin's tutelage, they offer Dynamite

Monster Boogie Concert, a steaming sludge-fest of Southern Rock:

crankin' riffs, butt-quaking bass, overwraught vocals, and cheesy-

but-scorching "Freebird"-style bottleneck geee-tar.

Skynyrd and ZZ Top are their obvious ancestors, and like those

bands, Slab are funky, in the original gamey body odour sense of the

word: Dynamite is crammed with stinky grooves. Once again, their

bulbous bombast seems no more retrogressive to me than the New Wave

of, say, Radiohead. And on the stand-out "Ain't Ugly None", they take

boogie into the future, using the studio to create an ambient

frightmare of feedback, then grinding out the most gruelling,

torsion-inducing riffage I've heard in many a long year.  Yumyum.

                                             

side note: from Record Collection Rock, published as The Perils of Loving Old Records, in the New York Times

"....On a more playful level, there's Monster Magnet

and White Zombie's nouveau biker rock (Steppenwolf, Blue

Cheer), or Raging Slab's resurrection of Southern rock

(Lynyrd Skynyrd, Black Oak Arkansas).  These bands'

revivalism is filtered through tongue-in-cheek humour, as in

the title of Raging Slab's latest album "Dynamite Monster

Boogie Concert", and its press kit, which contained

everything you'd need to attend an early 70's arena show: a

bottle of Thunderbird, a paper bag and a tube of glue, and a

lighter to hold up during the ballads."  

MUDHONEY, Fulham Greyhound, London
Melody Maker, April 8th 1989

by Simon Reynolds

Tonight, Mudhoney are a chastening experience for me. And, as our "emergent underground" hardens into homogeneity, as certain ideas congeal into a new orthodoxy, so I expect to have more and more encounters as schizoid as this one. See, Mudhoney tonight managed the singular feat of being utterly entertaining, and yet, at some deeper level, tedious beyond belief. I was bored, almost literally, to the brink of tears.

That a band can be this urgent, and yet so uninvolving, this frenzied, and yet so ultimately immobile, this charged, and yet so fundamentally lazy, is a testament to some kind of dire deadlock. The moment has passed, an impasse has been reached. It would be more rewarding to watch someone struggle, uncomfortably and unsuccessfully, to get to some beyond, than to witness something as consummate as Mudhoney.

For Mudhoney are immaculate. Every thrust, rip, rent, howl, jut and jive is perfectly placed, and asserts, with a conviction that's utterly convinving, that punk's not dead. And I don't mean some privileged moment in '76, but punk as Lester Bangs invented it, the bad boy trash lineage that runs from rockabilly, through Sixties garage, Seventies gumbo metal to contemporary thrash. It's alive and burning still. Mudhoney have the riffs, the songs, the vehemence, the
attitude, the windmilling longhair, the witticisms ... "I'll give $50 to the first guy to come onstage and throw his guts up", "we're not playing another song until they erect a stage barrier", "we're tired of all you over-active young people, let's have some old people up the front now" ... They've only just begun and already they're washed up, standing still at a point of perfection, giving the people what they want, fitting our talk without testing it, meeting our need without
stretching it.

"Mud Ride" tells the oldest story in hardcore, abduction and murder, froths at the mouth about "taking you any place/there's no place to hide", but no one here is remotely endangered. It's a scenario that's already becoming as cosy as the ritual narratives of heavy metal or Oi.

Maybe Mudhoney exhaust me because every word they incite in my mind feels tired and tame in the mouth. Maybe that's just my problem. But maybe - and it's worth considering - the teen sicko raving bloody mess-thetic is spent. Maybe trash is just trash. Sonic Youth have reinvented New York as a city of ghosts. Spacemen 3 have turned to ether. Pixies are now sculpted in five dimensions. So far, Mudhoney have set things up so that their only future is as the oldest teenagers in town. What they do, nobody does better. Do we need it anymore?