A bizarro triumph
Clarity might not be Wasted Shirt’s strong suit. Their debut album provokes more questions than it answers; for example, what’s a wasted shirt? Why is the album called Fungus II if it’s the band’s first album? What do any of these lyrics or song titles mean? How did prolific solo artist Ty Segall and Lightning Bolt’s wildly talented drummer Brian Chippendale link up for this project? For however esoteric a lot of this album may be, one thing is for sure – it is unbelievably, insanely, and aggressively entertaining.
The album gets off to a ridiculous start, as “All is Lost” begins with a brief clip of some screams, and then launches directly into a fast-strumming guitar madness that appears frequently on this tracklist. This track is a strong intro, introducing both the vocal weirdness that Wasted Shirt tends to lean into and the instrumental adventurousness that the pair pushes throughout the project’s 32-minute runtime. “All is Lost” weaves swiftly in and out of a number of prominent guitar tones, drum rhythms, and vocal samples. Next, “Zeppelin 5” ups the ante. The odd “dun dun dun” background vocal line manages to add an extra level of weird rhythmic complexity to this track’s drone-y instrumentation.
On “Fist is my Ward,” Wasted Shirt matches some of the album’s most incessant guitar and drum arrangements with ominous and characteristically left-field vocal work. It sounds like the type of music a gargoyle would make if he fully understood how to manipulate guitar tones. “Harsho” then proves that the band has plenty of chops in math rock and electronics as well. “Double the Dream” and “The Purple One” offer a further exploration into the noisy and unpredictable style that the group has been solidifying up to this point in the project. It remains incredibly unpredictable.
The guitars continue to whine, the drumming remains otherworldly, and the aggressive vocals always punctuate the pair’s instrumental work perfectly. “Fungus 2” is the project’s only interlude-esque track, but still impresses. It showcases Chippendale’s all over the place drumming style extremely well, while also flexing the pair’s production and sample usage ability a bit. Finally, “Eagle Slaughters Graduation” introduces some finality to Wasted Shirt’s perfected mixture of sliding guitar and fast-paced drums before “Four Strangers Enter The Dusk”, the madhouse version of all your favorite moments from the eight preceding tracks. It’s a very satisfying seven-minute closer.
Fungus II’s cover art looks like it wouldn’t feel all that out of place beside American Gothic in a museum. It shows a group of very average looking farm folk gathered around a modest picnic, with a single outlier; one smug, mohawk-rocking, leather-clad punk. Maybe this is a representation of Wasted Shirt. Maybe it’s an amalgamation of Segall and Chippendale’s musical personalities invading the world of traditionalism to make a genuinely different artistic statement. Maybe it’s just as meaningless as some of these hilarious song titles seem (“Eagle Slaughters Graduation”). Regardless of what it may actually mean, the cover of Fungus II does manage to accurately depict the contents of the album: intriguing, unexpected, and relentlessly entertaining.
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