Quasi: Hot Shit!
Little things that just don’t matter
Still could get me mad as a hatter
- “Hot Shit”
Quasi either took a sharp left turn on this record, or I just wasn’t paying close attention before. In the past their lyrics seemed to lie firmly in fantasy, describing Seuss-like worlds where fluent animals in unlikely situations acted out impossible and nonsensical scenarios. There’s a little bit of that on Hot Shit!, but the lyrics are now much more strikingly and overtly political.
Released in 2003, the anti-war message is inescapable. Explicit insults are handed out to W and the administration in “White Devil’s Dream” and the 9/11 imagery of “Seven Years Gone” is unambiguous. Here, though, lyricist Sam Coomes still does let the esoteric creep in by assigning playground nicknames to members of the cabinet. “Seven Years Gone” also seems to foreshadow Bush’s political isolation at the end of his presidency by drawing a comparison between him and The Flying Dutchman, while “Master & Dog” excoriates both parties as “the elephant wields the rod while the donkey throws you a bone/I’d rather have a bone than a beating I suppose,” in lyrics that are applicable at times when Democrats are in power, too. By the end of the song, Coomes goes the full kill-‘em-all, all-politicians-are-corrupt proletariat route and throws up his hands at the whole system: “Master is the country squire/And the housedogs lay by the fire/But it gets pretty hard for the dogs in the yard.” As much as I try to make lemonade out of our political system, it’s hard not to let these lyrics resonate as our squires let yard dogs without health care die every day…to take the analogy to its non-poetic ends.
Things changed far more for Quasi lyrically than they did musically onthis release. Take away the lyrics and this fits right in with their previous catalog. What Quasi does best they do even better here, namely mix dissonance and atonality into wonderfully crafted pop songs in a way that’s impossible not to notice but is also very appealing. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this band to anybody that liked catchy melodies and safe music, but they push the boundaries everywhere. They’re like the perfect introduction to experimental music.
In the past the band has tended to separate these two elements, leaving an abrasive song here and a song from The Beatles’ lost tapes there. On this disc, though, it’s all put together perfectly. Every song is the perfect mix of everything Quasi does and the album itself is crafted without flaw, with each song being the perfect one to follow the one it does, resulting in what might be the most palatable middle finger to consonance of all time.
Rating:
Mixers: “Seven Years Gone,” “Drunken Tears,” “Mama Tried,” “No One,” “Good Times”
Keepers: everything else
Filed Between: Quasi’s The Sword Of God and Queen (The Platinum Collection)
Tags: 2003, 4 lunchboxes, CD reviews, J-mez' collection, music