Review Summary: Rich lips that twitch with the promise of bitch..
I
Like the stock meliorist literature character from which they pulled their name, San Francisco noise punkers Tragic Mulatto spent their ten-year career flailing and flinging themselves between genres and niches, never settling anyplace long or hard enough for the froth to settle. Fermented in an agitated swirl of noise, psych freakouts, brass shrieks and avant-garde jazz extrapolation, the mercurial band’s second album
Hot Man Pussy saw them ratchet up every manic glister their debut offered a few notches, all the while sneakily tightening their punk exoskeleton to a neck-snapping point.
Hot Man Pussy exists in a perpetual state of wild-eyed bedlam, but like all deconstructionists before them who had a vision beyond mere anarchic disarray, Tragic Mulatto’s chaos is one that comes with a comely meticulous touch, a show of how a borderless view of where music can go serves to widen its perimeters rather than bash through and choke itself.
Most every sharp turn the band drop the listener into
in media res spends little time in justifying its own ends. The punch-drunk progression that arrives on the tail-end of “Hardcore bigot scum gets stabbed;” singer Flatula Lee Roth’s abrupt operatic veer that quickly spirals into orthodox strumming, and then just as rapidly into a tuba-laced psych arpeggio, feels less an exercise in dizzying subversion than it does the grander design of stretching limits in order to get someplace brighter and braver.
Every song on
Hot Man Pussy treks the same spiraling path, never lingering in a set state long enough to approach anything resembling commercial appeal or customary decency, instead collapsing into a demented cacophonous reach. The band’s straight-razor take on Zep’s “Whole Lotta Love” is as good a compressed view of them as one can hope for. Though Tragic Mulatto may not sport the clean technical tacks of Page, their mutation of the classic tune’s mid-song atmospheric break is louder, sharper and far more deranged.
Tragic Mulattos’ tour-mates during their relatively short lifespan were similarly insurrectionary. The Abrasive Texas hill people punk of The Dicks, scorching experimentalists Frightwig, as well as several other keystone acts from the Alternative Tentacles roster spent most of the 80’s imploding on stage alongside the West Coast pilots, laying down the second coming no-wave tropes that would soon give rise to 90’s post-hardcore, and bands like The Jesus Lizard, Cows and Babes in Toyland.
Hot Man Pussy remains their most pointed and maddened statement, an ardent belter of just how much new frontier you can claim when you hang your toes off the fringe.
