Album Description
"Check the intro to “Campaign Trail Mix.” Some amp fuzz, cymbal brushes and then a plodding three-note figure, it might qualify as the reverse of bombastic. The whole thing plods like a Diplodocus through the motions of what metal intros are supposed to be in such a hyper-literal way that the passage becomes both comedic and transcendent. By stripping away the stylistic armor, putting the exposed cliche under an electron microscope and pressing the red circle, RAUL has given us videotape of the genre’s underlying genotype. The effect is not unlike unbuttoning Andre the Giant’s leotard only to find that his whole, testosterone-inflated body falls off with it like a fat suit, leaving behind only a 2-Dimensional sprite of its original self standing in the ring. Yup, just like that.
The band has a lot of range, too: acoustic numbers, hazy atmospherics, falsetto singing. Take “Latin America,” a soft-ish prog jam with a gorgeous vocals and some jazz-tastic noodling. It’s as if there were actually a band called Simon and Gar-fu*k-all. These things both matter and don’t matter, the former because it sounds great, and the latter because RAUL’s whole point is that the salad dressing doesn’t really alter the vegetables underneath."
AEM004 RAUL by RAUL is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.