By Phillip Smith
Jeordi White (aka Twiggy
Ramirez of Marilyn Manson) and Chris
Goss (Masters of Reality) have collaborated once again to produce their first
full length CD together as Goon Moon.
Licker’s Last Leg uses a variety of musical styles to walk the listener
through the album. Apple Pie, the
first cut, almost scared me away from the CD with what I can only equate as the
musical equivalence of running fingernails down a chalk board. Eventually the annoyance stopped and the song
unfolded, nicely I might add. Although
there is a lot of Goth rock influences in Apple Pie, the rest of the CD seems to be a mix of
classic rock peppered with a dab of industrial. Tip Toe could easily have been
mistaken for a Devo song, with its mechanical beat and quirky lyrics. My Machine is another nice
track, it‘s a little faster than some of
the other songs, and uses several tempos and synthesized vocals at times, emitting an Eighties Techno/Metal
flavor. My favorite track though is An
Autumn That Came Too Soon. It has a
simple beat but it is very hypnotizing, with its tranquil repetitiveness and
smooth-as-silk vocals. Individually
these are all nice songs, but they don’t all necessarily all gel together as
well as I would have expected. What I
considered the strangest and most experimental track, The Golden Ball, stretches
to almost 10 minutes in length, and is composed of eight mini songs. The last and least track, Built in a
Bottle, could have been left off entirely and I would not have minded. It was too slow and whispery to follow the
eleven songs it followed.
