Fishbone

Chim Cim’s Badass Revenge (Arista)
by Sheril Stanford

If variety is the spice of life, Chim Chim’s Badass Revenge is one mighty tasty dish. Fishbone is known for leaving no musical stone unturned, blending ska, punk, funk, blues, and jazz elements into a simmering sonic goulash. It’s music for the attention deficit disorder crowd; if you don’t like it, wait a minute.

In their debut release for new label Rowdy Records (through Arista), L.A.-based Fishbone bills Chim Chim as a sequel to its last full-length, Give a Monkey a Brain and He’ll Swear He’s the Center of the Universe. Like that album, this disc is what I think of as “boy music,” containing obsessive references to nuts, balls, and shit. For instance, on “Monkey Dick,” frontman Angelo Moore laments, “my nuts, they itch rot/ my dick it burn hot.” Even so, Chim Chim is universally entertaining (with the possible exception of “Sourpuss,” which gives that word a new and skeevy meaning). Luckily, such inane lyrics are the exception, not the rule. For instance, the first cut introduces Chim Chim as the “imaginative mind that enables us to resist the strategies of containment brought to us by political thunder whores from on high/it’s the coming of the digital freakswing vs. ape kills master… the surrender of our dignities and the disintegration of the Wammo Frisbee within us all/of the side effects of the emerging techno psychology.” I don’t know what it means, but it sounds pretty good… Also included in the musical melange that is Chim Chim “Riot,” 57 seconds of high-speed social commentary, the Zappa-tinged “In the Cube” (complete with references to snow, toilets, and doo doo), and the title track, a psycho carnival acid funk ska punk raver. Chim Chim suggests you “structure your acceptance of the frequencies according to hope in man and a kickass outlook.” Me? I suggest you give the disc a listen.