Primus
Green Naugahyde

It's been a loooong time since Primus put out a proper album - 12 fucking years, to be precise, if you're not counting the throwaway EP they put out in the early aughts. In that period, they've toured several times - just long enough to keep people interested - and morphed from funk-punk-prog pioneers into a kind of jam-band for metalheads, managing to make long shows out of 8-song sets. Not that anyone minds - I saw them at Roseland a couple of years ago, and the crowd was so excited they demolished the barricade in front of the stage, something I haven't seen at Roseland ever, despite having seen bands like Slayer and Pantera there. But the question remained in every Primus fan's head: When they do come back, what the fuck are they going to sound like?

I suppose calling myself "ambivalent" about their new release, Green Naugahyde, isn't going to put me in the Music Critic Hall of Fame. But that's how I feel, nevertheless. I so badly want to give this album a good review, it hurts. Because I love Primus, and have since I first heard them in 1991. But I'm a music critic, and I'm an objectivist, so, here goes: The new Primus album is a decent, but not very good, slice of musical pie.

Songs like "Hennepin Crawler" and "Last Salmon Man" sound like Primus songs - that is, they're rhythm-section-driven funk jams with a lot of Zappa-esque guitar in the background - but there's two fundamental things missing here: the thrash and the danger. The thrash sound was a significant element in their early records. You could pogo to this music, or, just as happily, you could beat someone the fuck up to it. No matter how calm the song started, it was only a matter of time before frontman/bassist Les Claypool got around to pounding the shit out of his instrument.

Then there's the danger. No matter how light-hearted Primus songs may sound, they look pretty violent on paper. Someone almost always dies at the end of a Primus song, whether it's "John The Fisherman," swallowed by the ocean, or "Bob," who "hung himself in the doorway of the apartment where he lived," or "Jerry" the race car driver, who died a fiery drunk-driving death. The new songs on Naugahyde lack that element of shit grim-and-gory that made Primus such a bullet in the teeth in the first place. (The only track that maintains a glimmer of this attitude on Naugahyde is "Jilly's On Smack," a dark-ish number whose timbre is constantly belied by Claypool's histronic vocals.)

I think the problem - aside from the band making way for new drummer Jay Lane, the third of their career - can (I hope) be chalked up to the fact that the group hasn't recorded together in at least a decade. They've played old songs in that time, sure, but they haven't functioned as a songwriting unit in quite a while. Here's to hoping they don't wait another 10 years to find their common groove.