Review Summary: Elegaic, analogue oblations from the crystal skull
With the exponential growth of mind-strafing dullardry reaching the levels of a pandemic, it is a real tonic to have those most stalwart purveyors of high octane groove, Fu Manchu still releasing grandiloquent albums like 'Gigantoid. Essentially, guitar music has lost much of its genital fortitude due to the pervasive cull of an egregious mono-culture we all try so desperately to ignore; but the man won; and to the victor come the spoils of all this debasing mediocrity. To Whit: no riffs on the radio: no riffs on the Tele: no blasted riffs anywhere. This is cultural entropy. Sadly, there isn't a viable platform for unrepentant sonic longhairs on this wizened planatoid of ours; where popular music has long been reduced to that of an execrable jingle for indigestible, fat-saturated foodstuffs; but in the fecund 'inner realm' of the more cogent psychonaut, the music of Fu Manchu thrives; and by the sounds of things, the band are wholly energized; as `Gigantoid' is a monstrous flange-fest of primo garage-fuzz-bombs; and one which sits comfortably among the supa-fuzzoid pantheon of previous Fu greats: `King of The Road', `In Search of Space' and the voluptuously deep-mind penetration of `The Action is Go'.
I, unfortunately, still reside in London; that most neutered and horribly conformist city; yet, in my subjective reality, the mythic, locomotive fuzz of Fu Manchu can be heard blasting through every soft and unctuous speaker cone across a riff-sodden land. And in a world less-mad, all the acquiescent drones have traded in their iphones for turntables, and returned to a healthier, more tactile, less autistic age where people would actually 'ilke' the music they were playing to their real 3 dimensional friends; rather than procrastinate behind a corporate-led 'social media' hub.
Fu Manchu play riffs; they don't sell hair plugs, or cry about the rain forest on the interwebs: they play monstrous, sasquatch-killer riffage that readily crosses the brain-blood barrier with all the crushing efficacy of a plummeting claw hammer into the paltry brain case, we nebbish anthropoids use for a skull pan. They are a sublime, pan-dimensional unit of incorrigible wah-flange-over-driven, Sabbathian riff assassins; and these Californian hellions would, like, blow, bell-bottomed minds in '68'; and, miraculously, they certainly continue to do so in today's considerably more anodyne epoch. 'Gigantoid' is, quite literally, the finest elephantine heft of psychedelic, monstroid groove that you might purchase this year.
Feed your undernourished head a higher grade of sonic Gnosis; fill your sensitive, silken ear tubes with the gloriously thrusting, heavy rock tumescence of Fu Manchu, and thenceforth Detox your ailing mind with not infrequent insertions of 'Gigantoid'.It is always an intensely atavistic pleasure listening to the fulsome riff extrapolations of Fu Manchu; and one can easily imagine that our clod-headed, hirsute brethren, when first confronting the awesome basaltic expanse of the astral monolith, from whence all sentient life sprang, riotously celebrating this magnificent discovery by wildly imbibing on the anachronistic, valve-amp meltin', mega-frug decoction of Fu Manchu!
'Anxiety Reducer' indeed!
