Gabor Bonzo coat their kaleidoscopic dork-prog with enough sugary cartoonish fun it’s like they’ve shaken a can of grape soda to perfection and exploded it all over the damn place, allowing it to get in the cracks and circuits and reeds and of their instruments, all over their strings and drumheads. Welcome to “Wad,” the musical equivalent of a novelty can of spring snakes but filled with actual snakes, or a card trick gone horribly wrong or right depending on whose nicked artery is spritzing blood at a pace that probably requires a swift 911 call. That’s right, these chaps somehow managed to slap a sinister-looking twirly mustache onto the childlike whimsy their quick and demonstrative and jazzy meltdowns seem to constantly exude. A mustache like Waluigi’s.
Cartoonish fun is the name of the game on this gonzo debut (see what I did there?), and while many a Dr. Seuss-on-shrooms creature adorns the tape’s j-card, the more you look at them, the more you realize they’re crammed-together amalgamations of disparate entities dressed up to look maybe a bit more sinister than they really are – a “wad” of illustrator hyperactivity if you will. And the tape sounds an awful lot like a “wad” of hyperactivity as well, mainly a Herbie Hancock-meets-Dr. Seuss-on-shrooms kind of zany Technicolor stickiness that moves from one idea to the next with a rapidity that would make your straight brain spin. Good thing these lads are up to the challenge – they provide you with a ton of taffy to unravel as these twisty passages careen down unknown corridors. Sweet, sugary mind taffy.
Terry Tapes
--Ryan
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