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Released on May 12, 2015 via Satin Records Recordings
Good news: there are almost no vocoders used in this album. It is worth repeating: not a single vocoder (all right, one or two) was used in the making of this album.
If you didn’t hear Sun & Sail Club‘s last album, you won’t have a clue what the previous paragraph is about. If you did hear it, however, you’ll be glad that (I’m going to say it again) THIS ALBUM CONTAINS NO VOCODERS. Well, for 90 per cent of the tracks, anyway.
Because the over-use of the aforementioned effect on their début, Mannequin, divided fans, to say the least. Many wailed that it turned what should have been an awesome album from a fantasy stoner band containing Bob Balch and Scott Reeder, the guitarist and drummer from Fu Manchu, along with Scott Thomas Reeder, formerly the bass player in Kyuss, into a weird, hippyish mess.
This one, though, is as things should be. It’s an aggressive barnstormer, with Tony Adolescent from, well, The Adolescents, drafted in on vocals (sounding uncannily like Scott Hill from the ‘Chu did on their most aggressive record, The Action is GO) to make this sound a hell of a lot more rock than stoner.
And the only time the vocoder makes an unwelcome appearance is towards the end of the most trippy song on the album, the six-minute closer, ‘Cypherpunk Roulette’. Which we’ll allow. Just. The nine songs that precede ‘Roulette’ are ripped through mostly at a breakneck pace, with only one other breaking the three-minute barrier, the kind-of title track, ‘Fever Blister and the Great White Dope’, which represents the closest this foursome get to doom.
The remaining tracks fall loosely into two categories: straight ahead, driving, high-tempo songs like ‘Krokodil Dental Plan’ (which opens the album with a punch to the face), ‘Dresden’ and ‘Full Tilt Panic’; and numbers which sport angular rhythms and time changes, like ‘Baba Yaga Bastard Patrol’, ‘Migraine with a Chainsaw Reduction’ and ‘Inside Traitor, Outside View’.
The album roars by like a cheeky, hyperactive child and before you know it, you’re at the thumping intro to ‘Cypherpunk Roulette’, which pairs its chanting verse with a straightforward chorus straight out of a Fu Manchu song. Then comes the vocoder. But thankfully, it doesn’t last long.
