Red Giant ‘Dysfunctional Majesty’ CD 2010
YEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-HAAAAAAAAAAAAAW!!
Cleveland, Ohio shitkickers Red Giant are here to do BUSINESS. RAWKIN’ is their business, and their business is RAWKIN’. Make no mistake my friends, Red Giant know EXACTLY how to rock and they do NOT let up.
With 12 tracks totalling over an hour, ‘Dysfunctional Majesty’ is certainly giving you more bang for your buck, and the quality of the rock on display is of the HIGHEST calibre. Fans of Clutch, Hellacopters, Supersuckers and Unida should hitch their wagons to Red Giant, as this band is RIGHT up their dirty back-alley.
Red Giant is all about fuzzed-up acetylene blowtorch guitars, depth-charging bass, driving drums and rocktastic bourbon soaked vocals. Their riffs are full-on ROCKIN’ but can get as psychedelic as you want to be – such as on the Tool-esque ‘Million Point Buck’, with its chiming, snaking fuzz-wah guitar and stealth bass, and on the slothfully swinging ‘Silver Shirley’, containing as it does, echoes of a filthy Soundgarden at their doomiest, some truly beautiful lysergic guitar and bass interplay and an absolutely NUTZOID Stooges-style sax ‘goose in a windtunnel’ freakout – and these tunes have real depth to them – this isn’t just balls-to-the-wall dumbass rock-rock-rockin’ for the sake of it.
‘It Doesn’t Seem Right’ conjures up thoughts of Unida, with its supremely Garcia-esque vocal refrain. ‘These Satisfactions Are Permanent’ is like an outtake from Clutch’s ‘Elephant Riders’ – all throaty, gruffly commanding vocals, rhythmic interplay and lithely slippery quicksilver lead guitar – whereas ‘Herds Of Something Else’ slunks menacingly around, with its low-slung bass-driven groove threatening to devolve into violence at any minute, but instead breaking down into a syncopated QOTSA/Helmet fuzz-groove over which vocalist/guitarist Alex Perekrest howls like a rutting wolf in mating season.
The Tool feel rears its head again during instrumental penultimate track ‘Weird Problems’, in which the surging bass of Brian Skinner and the taut drums of Eric Matthews push the entwined guitars of Perekrest and lead guitarist Damien Perry into tricky yet graceful shapes, then use the gravity of their own momentum to pull them both back down to earth and into a headache inducing display of fuzzy syncopation. The track pulls and pushes both guitars hither and yon, before climaxing in a dazzling aerial display of perfectly controlled wah-abuse.
How to follow THAT? How about a cover of AC/DC’s perennial classic ‘Let There Be Rock’?
BANG-ON!!
So there you have it. The rock doesn’t let up, and quite frankly, you don’t WANT it to when it’s THIS damn good. Red Giant successfully rocked me like a hurricane for over an hour, and NOW I’m goin’ back for sloppy seconds. I urge y’all to do the same and go get rocked by Red Giant!!
Label: Small Stone Recordings
Website: www.myspace.com/ultramagneticglowingsound
Scribed by: Paul Robertson
