Fleshies

Fleshies With Toys That Kill and The Ponies

by Dean “Why, Oh Why Must Potatoes Cause Such Misery??” Bonzani

7-05-04

Potatoes can make you miserable. Potatoes that have been made into vodka, which is then chilled and mixed with 1/4 Rosa’s Lime Juice and drunk* in tiny green cordial glasses. Many, many tiny green glasses.

It is this potato misery that is helping Oakland, California’s Fleshies create exquisite pain in my foreskull at the moment. I’ve been looping the song “No One,” from Fleshies’ latest album, The Sicilian, on my WinAmp, and it ends with the sound of a mosquito in your ear, which is a truly brilliant ending to a 1:26 minute song full of gnashing, raw guitars and jackhammer drumming. After 26 listenings, I’ve grown rather fond of it.

Born in Oakland in 1999, Fleshies have cut a swath of destruction across North America, and most recently, Great Britain (which, by the way, is a pretty cocky moniker for a nation. How about “Pretty Good Britain?” It’s more subtle.) They’ve produced a slew of 7” records, demos, and lately, a couple of highly-regarded albums on Jello Biafra’s Alternative Tentacles record label, 2001’s Kill The Dreamer’s Dream, and 2003’s The Sicilian, which sports song titles like “Maelstrom of Whirling Bullshit,” “You’re All Doomed,” and “This Is The City Where All The Dirty Assholes Are Safe.”

With fond memories of Tempe’s Roads To Moscow’s ceiling of picture discs, it’s good to see a band that produces vinyl in such pleasing variety. A drunken, screaming, riff-rocking band that produces picture discs. And ruins the furniture in the living room of the house party that they’re playing extraordinarily loudly at. Fleshies are the bridge to another, better and punker era, without being a cheap anachronism. Um, they rock real hard.

Having played with Zeke, Drunk Horse, Pinhead Gunpowder, The Lewd, Queens Of The Stone Age, Dwarves, Melvins, and more, Fleshies are road dogs who never tire. In fact, sometimes they’ll stay awake for two straight days, aided only by refreshing Mountain Dew™.

And their music? If you injected a syringe full of methamphetamine, spiked with a liberal dash of Nyquil™ Nightime Cold Medicine, into the eyeball of each member of Pavement, then shoved them out onto a stage littered with rotting mackerel and ordered them to play a set of Butthole Surfers tunes backwards, they would sound slightly like Fleshies, if you were sure to bash the singer in the shins with a tire iron and accuse him of voting Republican first. Yeah, that’s about how they sound.

As a band, Fleshies tend to garner superlatives, but the praise is deserving and hard-won. They dish up a brutal and satisfying stew of gnarled, rooty punk, shoving it straight down your eager throat. Things break, ears ring for hours, and unnamable substances are washed from the skin for days.

A final thought: “The Last Friday,” from The Sicilian, is one of the greatest rock tunes ever. I said, “EVER.” Take that home.

And Toys That Kill? A smarter, crunchier, non-annoying version of Supernova. The answer to the unspoken question is: YES! They DO!

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Fleshies W/ Toys That Kill and The Ponies, Mon., Aug. 16th, at 111. Pay the price.

*drank? drinked? dranken?

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