Released: 1994
Tracks: Sooth; ‘Cause of Breakfast; The Desired Effect; Skunk; I’m Glad There’s Lemon-Freshened Thorax in You; Top of Stove Melting; Aglow; Bryan Beller’s Favorite Song; Deep-Fried Skinks are Go!; Good Morning, Sometime; Them Dolphins is Smart; 1988 Was a Million Years Ago; Yep, Them Dolphins is Smart, Alright; Bullys (sic); My Dilemma; Helen Was Brash; Weekend; Land of Broken Dreams; Blameless (The Floating Face); That Claim-Jumping Swine, O’Bannon; Faithful Axe; Natty Trousers; Scotch; There Have Been Bad Moments; Frang Tang, the Valentine Bear; I Will; In the Bond World; The Old Boat Guy, Part 1; The Old Boat Guy, Part 2; The Old Boat Guy, Part 3
Best track: hard to pick…uh…either Breakfast, Desired Effect, Skunk or My Dilemma
Tracks to skip: Old Boat Guy 1-3, the main song part of Aglow (after the cool fretless stuff), Weekend, Faithful Axe & In the Bone World are most important to skip. The less important skippers are Lemon-Freshened Thorax, Beller’s Fave Song, Deep-Fried Skinks, Helen & O’Bannon. Bullys, Natty Trousers and Frang Tang are kinda boring too
Well! I’m certainly hitting that skip button a lot, aren’t I? Let’s break this down (shall we?): there are 30 tracks on Boil That Dust Speck and in my opinion 14 ½ should not be here. The tracks that SHOULD be on here go as follows: Sooth, ‘Cause of Breakfast, Desired Effect, Skunk, Top of Stove Melting, first 30 seconds of Aglow, Good Morning, Dolphins>1988>Dolphins, My Dilemma, Land of Broken Dreams, Blameless, Scotch, Bad Moments & I Will. That brings this album down from 74 minutes to about 43. So yeah, almost half of this CD is really not so hot. That stuff just shouldn’t be on here. I can understand a couple of tracks not needing to be on here, but 31 minutes is ridiculous.
There are some other problems with this album too. I don’t think Mike was really quite in his head when making this. It’s like Hat in that it’s all over the place, but where on Hat it sounds extremely creative, here it sounds like he has no idea what he’s doing. A lot of these songs are not well written, even some of the ones I’d keep. Actually, I know Mike wasn’t in his right frame of mind when doing this. Both Frank Zappa (his mentor and friend) and his father died around the time of these sessions. There’s a lot of anger in this album and that’s kinda disturbing since Keneally is usually a pretty happy guy. I Will is probably the happiest thing on here. Good Morning, Sometime sounds ‘happy’ but it actually has this extremely sarcastic overtone that takes away from any good the song might do for the world. I still like it though, but it’s unsettling. I know Mike stands by this album, and all the tracks on here, but the Old Boat Guy suite is really useless. I realize it’s a tribute by Mike for Frank Zappa (FZ loved percussion and these 3 songs are all percussion), but it doesn’t sound good. It’s really just…bad. Man, I’ve TRIED to appreciate them, but I can’t. Not one bit. As for Faithful Axe, it’s another tribute, this time to Yes, but it’s even more obnoxious than Old Boat Guy is. Besides all the poorly written songs, all the “links” that he uses (the lesser-skipped tracks) sound really forced on this album and tend to just clutter it up. It sounds like a bad Zappa imitation.
So that’s all my negative stuff (gee, is that all?). The positive: all of the players on here sound great; some of the compositions are excellent; the liner notes are hilarious; wordswordswords. There *is* good on here, it’s just totally buried underneath heavy piles of clutter and junk. I know Keneally needed to make this album, mostly for his own sanity and piece of mind. And like I say all along, with Mike Keneally’s albums we actually get to witness him grow and progress as a songwriter and as a person. Rarely do you get that personal of detail when someone makes albums. I think in a way, it makes me like him even more. It’s just a bit uncomfortable sometimes watching that growth. After getting this, I now have a newfound admiration for Sluggo and especially the opening track Potato. Potato shows that he got through all the funk of Boil That Dust Speck just fine.
Rating: 75
Write a comment