Music Review: Gary Lucas, Gods and Monsters - Coming Clean

It’s getting harder and harder to find innovative rock music. The enterprise has become so ensconced in commercialism, it seems the best musicians sell out to simple, garden-variety, three-chord junk without bothering to bend genres while bending guitar strings.

Fortunately, Gary Lucas is the exception to this rule. Lucas has a long-standing career as a visionary guitarist and bandleader. His latest effort with his on-again, off-again back up band, Gods and Monsters, is a tribute to the many influences that made an a huge impression upon Lucas on his path to musical brilliance. The experience of listening to the bands latest album, Coming Clean, is similar to the feeling one gets from attending a meditative session at a ritualistic sweat lodge.

Lucas’ own style is evident here. He wields an axe of shamanistic proportions, casting spells as he weaves extraordinary notes through a series of finger aerobics that others would consider death defying. Lucas has always borrowed rather heavily from jazz avant-garde stylist David Torn, and also from an early entry in the Pat Metheny catalog, Song X. Even though these two influences are apparent, Lucas’ attack is beyond anything either Torn or Metheny have come up with so far, and Lucas is not afraid of sacrificing technical precision for some gutsy, straight-from-the-heart renditions of his songs.

Coming Clean allows Lucas to tip his hat to many more masters of guitar rock, including Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, Robert Fripp, Frank Zappa, Richard Thompson, and on one particularly beautiful cover, the recently departed Jeff Buckley. Each piece on the album swings wildly with eclecticism, with Lucas bringing a highly erotic charge to each of the pieces. In a strange way, Coming Clean could be the soundtrack to a multi-orgasmic experience after one has downed several tabs of LSD.

Gods and Monsters do an outstanding job keeping up with Lucas’ frenetic pace. On Coming Clean, the back up band includes the all star cast of Ernie Brooks (Modern Lovers) on bass, Billy Ficca (Television) and Jonathan Kane (Swans) on drums, Jason Candler (Hungry March Band) on alto sax, Joe Hendel on trombone, and Jerry Harrison (Talking Heads) on keyboards. Included in the lineup are guest appearances by David Johansen (New York Dolls), Elli Medeiros (Stinky Toys), Richard Barone, and Michael Schoen. Throughout, Brooks, Ficca, Kane, and Harrison keep the songs atilt, providing the foreplay to Lucas’ throbbing, fully immersed chops.

Article Author: Larry Sakin

Larry Sakin is a former music executive and non-profit medical organization administrator. He advocates for literacy issues and provides advocacy training for grassroots and non-profit groups around the country.

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