Full On Dunes
by Craig Regala
Fucking toad fulla red wine and buckshot rock is what everyone says. Well… I will concur BUT amend Dali’s Llama never get boring and beat you over the head with stupe via dullish boogie, they beat you with classic Chuck Berry tuck-the-pinky-in via slurred desert blues abstracted from the sensible space between Thin White Rope and Kyuss. Their “boogie” is chopped and channeled with a tension/release akin to the great early ’70s Brit blues-rock stuff; The Groundhogs, The Edgar Broughton Band, Savoy Brown, Free with thee, uh, relaxed approach of AY-CE-fucking-DEE-fucking-CEE in ’76 pork roast mode. It ain’t all frenzy folks, it’s got the swagger Kiss touched during “God of Thunder” and Grand Funk ‘n’ The James Gang groped a dozen times during many a prom, all cut with a grit-in-the-eye sensibility. The grin that knows “Hey, it’s all sweat and jizz ’til someone has to pay child support.” Damn.
All this really means (I get paid by the word, so yer gonna get a few extra) is you get gummy riffs sticking to ANY black t-shirt that contained a yowler who yowled at The MC5, yowled at Thin Lizzy, yowled at Saxon, then yowled at Green River, yowled at Fatso Jetson, and takes his nephew to the Motörhead, Misfits, Year Long Disaster, Valient Thorr tour BUT only after the Glasspack, Totimoshi, Nebula show (salting the Nation’s better clubs this Fall). C’mon, I’ve sailed on the good ship D.L. for a few years now and I’m not getting’ off ’cause they get in there and slug-it-out with 50 years of rock plus roll plus roots fuel bulking up their wood-choppin’, sand-surfin’, swamp-skatin’ bar hum. Shit, this elemental can’t fake it: You’d know before the first tune was a minute in. Hey, if they weren’t fucking “it,” they wouldn’t have folks from Throw Rag, Kyuss, Yawning Man, and Hot Beast Pussy Fiend chipping in, would they?
(www.dalisllamarecords.com)