Nick Oliveri and company are back with their first new album in eight years. Now featuring former members of Nebula and John Garcia’s Band of Gold, Mondo Generator packs 14 tracks into 43+ minutes on this double-middle-finger-adorned record.
Opening salvo “Nowhere Man” opens with a pretty decent desert-rock groove, though it picks up the pace to a mid-tempo shuffle beneath Oliveri’s punk-rock barking vocals. “Up Against the Void” is up-tempo from the get go, a frantic, two-minute hardcore number akin to Bl’ast! And speaking of Kyuss, Nick formally puts his former band to bed with the Blues for the Red Sun grooves of “Kyuss Dies!” by repeating the song title some 20-odd times in its final minute.
Following the Zeke-style party rock anthem “Turboner,” the title track reminds me more of latter-day Orange Goblin…until it breaks for a Queen-style stomp-stomp-clap section around the 1:10 mark. Uh, what the fuck?
Sandwiched between several fast-paced, punk-rocking tunes, instrumental “Silver Tequila: 666 Miles Away” is sort of a strung-out stoner-rock version of The Champs classic for its first two minutes, with the only lyrics being “Silver… Tequila!” But it then takes on a more typical song structure, sounding more like something offa Cocaine Rodeo. The creepy, crawling “Option Four” is also somewhat along the lines of “Shawnette Jackson,” except it’s a mainly spoken-word vocal about such topics as getting high and suicide by cop. In other words, more or less what we might expect from Nick Oliveri.
https://heavypsychsoundsrecords.bandcamp.com/track/when-death-comes
(Heavy Psych Sounds)
