Review Summary: Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (Primus Remix)
While Primus were showing signs of stagnation on
The Brown Album and
Antipop, Primus & the Chocolate Factory is a clear sign that the band is running low on steam. It seems like a match made in heaven: your favorite wacky childhood film pairing up with Primus the poster child for mainstream weirdness, but too much of anything is always a bad idea. With Les Claypool's eccentric and over the top vocal delivery every song sounds like it’s being sung by an Oompa Loompa now. Primus stick to their guns with this tribute album doing the 1971 film, and the band’s legacy a disservice by moving farther and farther away from the innovative band we once knew and loved.
There is a childlike imagination and sense of wonder that pervades Willy Wonka, and Primus drowns out this essential aspect of the film by making every second of this tribute album heavy and distorted as all hell. Nothing is light or breezy, and the few attempts they make to soften things up is a pitiful consisting of only a minimal sprinkling of xylophone here and there. While this off kilter sound doesn’t accurately represent its source film, but it is without a doubt the tried and true Primus sound. On the song “Golden Ticket” Les Claypool’s funky bass playing is incredibly catchy, and reminiscent of the earworms of Primus’s good old days circa
Frizzle Fry. It’s a genuinely great tune, that can’t be ruined by comparisons to the original song. Straight after this we are bombarded by a bastardization of “Pure Imagination” that just feels wrong. That’s the problem with tribute albums. If we want to listen to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory we are going to listen to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory not Primus’s lesser-than tribute. Also, Primus can’t do subtle. They can be quiet, but they always have the cheese factor up to eleven, and that’s why “Semi- Wondrous Boat Ride” doesn’t work. In the original version Gene Wilder gets slowly louder and crazier and crazier and louder, but Primus is on full blast at all times resulting in some less than satisfactory buildups on
Primus & The Chocolate Factory.
If there is anything to gush about on
Primus & The Chocolate Factory it’s the closing track entitled “Farewell Wonkites”. The original is jam packed with extravagant string, and elegant tenor vocals. Primus’s drugged out version is trippy, and beautiful in its own right still containing the iconic “world of pure imagination”. It’s easy to look past the album’s source material when it still contains what we loved about the original, but when they copy and paste too much from our beloved family film, instead it feels like the ugly red-headed stepchild of the bunch. It’s a thin line that the album crosses far too often. Les Claypool’s vocal delivery is as cheesy and over the top as its ever been to the album’s dismay. A lot of the time he doesn’t even sing, instead there’s odd chants that never harmonize correctly, and it’s just irritating. Primus go out of their way to annoy on
Primus & The Chocolate Factory. Willy Wonka was a very strange film, with alien imagery and out of the ordinary situations that seem perfect for a Primus album. If there was no source material, I’m sure Primus could have thought of something this odd on their own, and I’m sure thats what drew Primus into making a Willy Wonka tribute album. The lyrics are right at home when compared to other Primus albums, but the heavy as balls guitars, and Les’s funky bass isn’t what comes time mind when we hear these lyrics. Primus was doomed from the start.
Primus & The Chocolate Factory is by far Primus’s least interesting musical endeavor. Making a tribute to a beloved cinema classic is an admirable task, but when you’re just remixing the film’s original soundtrack and turning it into a half assed record, it makes the band look unbecoming. Primus has stuck with their out of the box formula for so long that it has become as stale as year old bread. If this was the reason why the classic Primus lineup got back together after 19 years apart, then they should not have reunited. This is Primus trying to recreate the glory days and failing miserably.
