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The Mighty Vitamins, "Take-Out"
An initial spin of this album will leave a sense of "what the hell did I just listen to?," but a few more rotations and what's revealed is some of the most spastic of free jazz and a set of music just waiting to have a cartoon accompaniment.
Remember those really old cartoons from childhood like Tom & Jerry, Bugs Bunny, etc.? Remember how they all had a sort of jazzy backing track that augmented the action oh-so-well? The Mighty Vitamins have updated this for the current millennium, and the resulting freakout is great.
The opener "Get a Good Job" establishes the mood for the next 40 odd minutes: a percussion section that sounds sourced from Fred Sanford's junkyard, guitar string abuse that is surely a crime in most states, and dialogue samples right out of a cartoon. Structurally, it doesn’t make much sense, but this blasting opening is followed up by the much more subtle four track "Kaw River Suite," which is based on much of the same instrumentation, but it sounds like someone slipped some Ritalin or Xanax into the boys' kool-aid as their playing is so much more restrained and calm, doing much more "mood" music than anything else. It's not bad at all, but honestly it detracts from the spazz flow of the disc, which really doesn't need any sort of break
Once "Nakatani" gets started again with its shrill sheet metal scrapings and flaming cat howl horns, you know the freakout has begun yet again, which then fails to let up throughout the remainder of the disc, with even some dirty Detroit funk rearing its Parliament-loving head in the massive "39 Steps" and "April 21."
Take-Out is not an album for everyone. In most ways it is dissonant, atonal, and insanely chaotic. It shines through these adjectives, however, making for a hyperactive romp that a cartoon mouse could napalm a cat to. Someone see if they can reanimate Mel Blanc's corpse so he can check this out!
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