Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Flipper- Generic? Like no other, July 3, 2001
I saw the band on tour for this album. I also had the pleasure of seeing them several other times. A Flipper show was always an experience. Always a party atmosphere. I remember Bruce standing up and announcing that the show would start once someone bought the band a round of pitchers of beer. After about five minutes of ranting at the audience someone gave in a bought the round. Bruce proceeded to chug his down before going into a brilliant rendition of "I Don't Want to Live If I Can't Get Drunk". The whole band had obviously been partying prior to the show and before the end of the set the only member of the band on stage was Will. The rest of the band had either passed out or fallen off the stage only to be replaced by a member of the audience. One of the best rock shows ever!This album captures the true spirit of the band better than any other material they released- except maybe the "There was an Old Lady" single. "Sex Bomb" is one of the greatest rock songs ever recorded and the rest of the album is just as good. The musicianship is minimal and incompetent, the lyrics are insightful and the album should only be played at maximum volume. It is even better if you are drunk. This band was one of the most important in all of hardcore. When this music first came out the hardcore scene was quite diverse and the music had not yet developed into a "formula". Bands took different paths to reach the intensity and chaos that this whole movement represented. Flipper took the route past the keg of beer at your backyard barbeque.
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17 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Shrieking, Dionysian Zenith of Civilization , May 12, 2005
The band too punk for punk, as guitarist Rikk Agnew described them, Flipper did with rhythm what abstract expressionism did with line/form, and declared war on middle class, all-American valuations, as well as those they found stupid and pretentious within the growing punk movement. Ted Falconi is the Jimi Hendrix of rhythm guitar, slashing scales, cobbling them into sometime-chords, then blasting them apart again just for laughs and a true anarchy in the song: for those who want anarchy to live up to content AND form, this is your band; Falconi's neurology-warping excursions get so vast and chaotic, that the bass actaully holds the melody while the guitar churns a mass
of antonality, and somehow drummer Steve Depace centers the hurricane and keeps it together.
Flipper was fronted by two fierce geniuses, one of the head, Will Shatter, and one of the heart, Bruce Loose; they shared their mutual singing, bass-playing, & songwriting duties with an ego-lessness (in every sense) that is rarely found in rock n roll or any other art. They sang separately, and also together, as in a duet of doom on masterpieces like "We Don't Understand," on Public Flipper (so named for Mr. Rotten's theiving of Generic years later, based upon this album), which is still available on vinyl from Subterrarean records in San Francisco, which Google will turn up though don't trust my spelling.
Will constructed songs from influences like Wilhelm Reich, Greco-Roman religions (mistakenly and rhetorically called "Myth"),
Hindu morality plays, philosophers like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and, just plain "Life," which is one of Flipper's most hilarious songs, meant sarcastically and seriously depending
on their moods; Bruce wrote songs of both his growing up in the treacheries and euphoria of San Francisco's Haight, and of the
psychology underlying many of the "politics" trumpeted by revolutionaries, and also "Life." Bruce maybe be a nihilist by method yet hope and humor show on many of the songs he wrote,
including the confessional EVER, which is on this album. "Ever look at a flower and hate it?!"
While the joking SEX BOMB BABY is always touted as the band's hit, the yowls of despair and suicidal intensity of a love affair
aborted in I SHINE YOU SHINE is truly the band's greatest work.
It is simply one of sublimest, most dramatic expressions of sorrow in any form of music.
Flipper originated a new style which alternated between super-fast, typical punk, to a depression-sodden, opiated, lurching & listing, slowwwwwww'd tempo which soon was copied by numerous bands, and was cited by Kurt Cobain as one of his most powerful influences. SHED NO TEARS is also one of the greatest songs ever written, and swings & hops to a happy-go-lucky nihilism that most people haven't the philosophic or tempramental stamina to endure. Its bass line & meldody, invented by Bruce Loose in a moment of stabbing desperation, is a trademark FLIPPER fulmination. Ecce Homo: it's not easy living with a sight into the depths of the human psyche but Flipper puts a gleeful floppery on "only pain, suffering, and death..."
What a great song to DANCE to, truly. Only the Dionysians could get it.
(...)
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
All time classic, August 2, 2004
Flipper were, without a doubt, one of the best eighties punk bands. You've never heard of them? Thats quite surprising considering Kurt Cobain freqeuntly mentioned them in interviews, REM covered sex bomb and Jello Biafra once stated that Flipper were one of the best bands in the punk scene.
It is a shame this band gets almost no recognition, because they really do stand out from the generic thrash hardcore that the punk scene almost entirely consisted of at the time. Instead of playing speed punk, Flipper took the hardcore sound of bands like black flag, minor threat and the germs and slowed it down. The music may take awhile to get into as it sounds so different from anything else. I didnt like Flipper when I first heard them, but I gave them a few more listens and now I love them.
What you hear once you play this album is loud basslines against Ted Falconi's quiet, distorted guitar, with Steve DePace hammering away at the drums. Over all this you hear either Bruce or Will ranting about the meaningless of existence in a cruel and uncaring universe. Just take a look at some of the lyrics to Way of the World: "There are eyes that cannot see and fingers that cannot touch. Thats the way of the world. There are dreams left empty and blank and legs that have ceased to walk. Thats the way of the world." The mood of every song on this album is the same, apart from sex bomb, where Bruce Loose Tries to shake listeners out of the depression that listening to the other songs are likely to have caused by playing a happy song.
This is, qutie simply, one of the best albums ever recorded. Pity its out of print. But then again, not many people are aware of Flipper's existence. If you want to hear generic hardcore, go and buy a CD of some band called Negative Youth or something like that. If you want to hear a band who dared tobe different, then check out Flipper. Every song on this album is great.
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