Where the album makes its most fervent bid is in the realm of composition, with writing that’s as intricate as the playing, and nearly as accomplished. “Hydra,” his first proper solo album in eight years, will surely bolster his demigod stature among a certain breed of aspiring guitarists, though by now, at 51, he doesn’t really need help in that area. There’s an extraordinary level of detail in Ben Monder’s music, and it begins where his fingertips meet various fretboards, reeling off notes in tight and complicated whorls. But as was more clear on its last album, Five Finger Death Punch is interested in rubbing against the grain, too, heard here in a cover of LL Cool J’s “Mama Said Knock You Out,” a slice of meathead rap-rock that suggests this band may have been studying up on the “Judgment Night” soundtrack. Sometimes the group is sludgy when it should be terse, and sometimes its parroting of 1980s metal modes is overwhelming. The guitarist Zoltan Bathory is flashy, adding quick filigree solos that compress mayhem into small bursts, and the drummer Jeremy Spencer plays with density and force, holding things together. There are welcome flashes of speed-metal and less welcome flashes of melodic hard rock that are a direct rejection of this band’s strengths.
This is intensely physical music, inelegant and powerful, coming off like soundtracks to mixed martial arts bouts and military invasions. Most of the contemplation on this album, though, takes place in the body. Halford veers from the pneumatic script: On “Wrong Side of Heaven,” he talks about God as a woman, and on “Diary of a Deadman,” he speaks about abandonment by someone he expected better of. He sings huskily and with clear aggression - though he’s no match for the guest Rob Halford (of Judas Priest) on “Lift Me Up” - and sometimes dips into soft singing that occasionally serves as ecstatic release but is mostly just a breather. Here, mostly, the singer Ivan Moody sticks with hostility as a mode. Bass lines lope and skulk, the drums sputter with offbeats, and rhythm guitar and keyboards share a flippant, cackling cross talk, like wiseguys in the back of a high school classroom. In Neville grooves, Dumpstaphunk operates less like a funk machine locking into a pattern, more like a finely coordinated organism in motion. Dumpstaphunk is steeped in the mad science of New Orleans syncopation as defined by the Neville Brothers and, before them, Art Neville’s band the Meters. “Dirty Word” is its second full-length album.ĭumpstaphunk is led by the keyboardist and singer Ivan Neville, the son of Aaron Neville and a former member of the Neville Brothers band founded by his father and uncles Art, Charles and Cyril. And while many New Orleans funk bands rely on the city’s trove of oldies, some are generating new material - including Dumpstaphunk, the band that plays the city’s hardest-hitting funk. Funk, soul and old-fashioned R&B are still live dance music in the city’s clubs.
0 kommentar(er)
