Album review: The Fleshtones – Face of the Howling Werewolf
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Veteran super-rockers renew their own sound through overripe sarcasm
The Fleshtones have been around for a while now. Nearly their fifth decade since their CBGB debut, this is their 23rd Full LP and they don’t give up. One would think that if the group itself is reluctantly heading towards the last stage of its life expectancy, then its members must be dying. But we would be surprisingly wrong. Even as senior citizenship looms on the horizon, they bring their retrophile and non-copiable âsuper-rockâ in their latest, Face of howling werewolf. But now it looks like the signature sound reflects his age, for better or for worse.
It opens with the title song of Lupine, leaving no build-up to the main feature. They channel B-level horror into mimed lyrics and outlaw the twang in this romance story gone awry. Her date, which had pulled back and kept her face hidden all night, bared her hoodie to reveal, you guessed it, the face of a howling werewolf. Terrified, he reserves it. Finally alone, he looks at himself in the mirror not to see his own but the face of a howling werewolf. The song is absolutely crazy. Tremolo chords and a scrambled, messy solo respond to the shock. It’s quite reminiscent of The Cramps, which isn’t too unfathomable considering they shared the same rehearsal space as the mad inventors of psychobilly.
With the exception of a few tracks, the whole record is in this succinct rockabilly-gone-punk instrumentation with a wacky accent and even more wacky lyrics. The last track featured the mocking tone of the album, but lead singer Peter Zaremba takes it one step further. âAlex Trebekâ pokes fun at Jeopardy’s bespectacled teddy bear host. With his tongue buried deep in the hollow of his cheek, Zaremba chants the absurdity to him. âAlex Trebek awaits youâ with âcategories to choose from,â seemingly elated as the game show host’s affable aura appears on the TV screen.
Their sneers continue to run out of control in “Manpower Debut”. Pursuing something more delicate than Alex Trebek, it’s masculinity’s turn to be rotten tomato. Hard-hitting power chords assert themselves in macho minimalism as the ultimate man demanding extra cheese on his pizza – a shrugged symptom of his toxic masculinity – or screaming pugnaciously about how he’s got enough hand – work for everyone like a drunken cynosure until the song darkens with it. Zaremba even despises a gigantic newspaper in the merry “The Show is Over”. “I had my doubts about you, but as the New York Times likes to say,” Zaremba sings before slipping into the choir’s chorus, “come on, come on / the show is over” between the screams of harmonica and the silly camaraderie singing all tucked away in a blues beat on speed.
Like all The Fleshtones records of the last days, these rock ‘n’ roll tropes of yesteryear are ubiquitous. “Swinging Planet X” centers on a thinly veiled rip-off of a famous Bo Diddley hit, circumventing copyright infringement by including Western electric guitar riffs. Then he jumps from the 50s to the 60s in “Spilling Blood (At the Rock N ‘Roll Show)” and “Child of the Moon” which both engage in stock maneuvers of the time, the second a cover of The Stones.
Generally, Face of the howling werewolf is a parody album. He chews up made-up, real characters with a laugh, and delves into hot topics of the day if he doesn’t content himself deliberately with time-worn love themes. The Fleshtones don’t take themselves seriously in their self-proclaimed âsuper rockâ style. Maybe they’ve had enough of their own invention, and because they’ve used it all up, they squeeze her until her insides come out. The final track, âSomerset Morning,â a wacky instrument, casually kicks off the ending as the band smirk at what they’ve come up with this time around but without a clue of what’s next.
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