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This album is a joke. A distasteful stink-bomb that doesn't
even deserve a courtesy laugh and grows more tiresome with each subsequent
listen -- if you can even last through an initial one...
Not "gay" by any definition of the word, Gay Tastee and
his self-proclaimed "cast of losers singing the slurred voice of
truth" is headed by Stephen Gaylord, a member of The Wasted
from Albany, NY. This stuff's made in a New York CITY? It sounds more
like poisonous moonshine home-brewed in a slimy plastic wading pool somewhere
on the outskirts of the Bible Belt...but with a Studio City backdrop.
"Cast" is right - this project feels gimmicky and affected,
like a trendy trucker hat bought at Anchor Blue. It's a serving of rusty
Pinto muffler pipe all choked up with downer dust, splashed with a generous
glug of synthetic country-bluegrass and left to rot into something bilious
-- this "Bathtub Gin" will give you gut-rot.
Sure, the guitar work is catchy in a folksy, lo-fi, fuzzy psychedelic
AM rock radio way, but with run-on lyrics like the following (verbatim
from the album insert): When the shit hits the fan they're the ones
who'll be ready lifting the hammers to bring it all down I wish I could
sit and talk shit like Hitler and keep you on the edge of your seat with
what I said but whenever I tried it just came out in babble and the people
started laughing and shaking their heads and a big fat joint is what I
should be smoking as I wait for the messiah to lead me home but until
that day 'til the day that I'm ready keep your fucking hands off me and
leave me alone. Oy VEY -- the songs are wearisome, offensive
and just plain yucky. It all comes across as self-indulgent, juvenile
drivel. These are rebels-without-a-cause of the most irritating kind:
young and bright, but too lazy to do anything but fart around and kvetch
about "The Man" and their quarter-life crises.
In checking out www.gaytastee.com, we are greeted with two links - one
black, one white - that each say, "GAY TASTEE HATES YOU!", and
very little else. That pretty much sums it up, folks! This entire two-disc
album is one long, dragged-out, dyspeptic finger-pointing bitch-fest about
drugs, booze, domestic violence, overworked baby mommas, AWOL alcoholic
fathers and other accoutrements of a Hollywood trailer park ghetto. Bodily
functions are frequently used as adjectives. We're left feeling sullied
and sullen…
Towards the album's godforsaken end, I felt like sprinkling my toothbrush
with Comet and scrubbing out all four of my lobes (ear and brain).
The Tastee rendition of "Sixteen Tons" was halfway appealing,
and "Designated Driver" contains a mildly entertaining drum-and-guitar
theme copped from The Ramones' "The KKK Took My Baby Away",
but the rest smacks of a bad, tainted, cacophonous version of Beck's
Mellow Gold (especially on Volume 1, Track 7, "The Krakow
Kid" - a tedious ten minutes long).
To be fair, I held out 'til the end of the entire twangy, whiny, excruciating
thing, but would rather have been attached to a fast-moving vehicle by
winch hooks through my earlobes and dragged through upholstery tacks.
-Dee Vinyl
Track Listing:
Volume 1
1. Webcor
2. Bathtub Gin
3. Homo Radio
4. Shot to Shit
5. Seeds and Stems
6. Taming the Lyon/Sixteen Tons
7. The Krakow Kid
Volume 2
1. Ditchweed
2. Food and Weed
3. Shovels
4. Bedwetter
5. Sanford and Son
6. St Peter
7. Mountain Music
8. Designated Driver
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Gay Tastee
