Audio By Carbonatix
Yukster Ben Long juggles musical genres like rubber chickens on this amusing exercise in stylistic sleight of hand. Singing and playing every instrument (minus saxophone and pedal steel) himself, Long seems as comfortable rendering a breezy samba (“Strange Dreams”) as he does flirting with Southern boogie (“Dumpster Divin’ Debra”). And in the course of a single, head-scratching instrumental like “Great Divide,” he shifts gears without warning, turning a country tear-jerker into a flamenco-tinged raver in the blink of an eye. The cheesy, jazz-lite “Stalkin’ and Streakin'” borrows a riff from “The Candy Man” to explore one man’s unrequited love for an unsuspecting lass — naked and drooling in a tree outside her bedroom window, that is. Lyrically, the tunes admonish consumerism (“Sheeple”), champion back-door carnality (“Doggy Style”) and indulge in the unintelligible ramblings of somebody who sounds a lot like Boomhauer from King of the Hill (“Skillet Monroe”). Stop making sense.
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