Randy Sax: PRAISE GOD RAISE HELL
White, suburban kid discovers garage band!
Devoid of any meaning or direction, Randy’s debut album is a real clunker. Repetitive loops glide by song after song leaving no imprint on the listener. In fact, if it weren’t for the obnoxious one-liners like, “what’s the difference, between me and your father, you call me daddy, I skirt skirt in a Mazda”, to grab my attention, I would call this white noise. But alas, this is not white noise, it is offensive and questions the listener’s intelligence for even listening to it.
Songs like ‘Bump’ and ‘Praise God Raise Hell’ conjure up images of a pot smoking bum in his mid 30s, standing on the corner of a second tier city, shittily dancing on cardboard and blasting homemade loop beats on a boom box from the 80s as he mumbles, rants and yells at unassuming passerby’s until the cops arrive and shut him down for the day.Some parts and songs like ‘Famous’ are so repetitive and void of anything substantial, it is hard to even refer to them as filler. Occasionally throughout the album we are gifted with a brief reprise from the trash, such as a one minute into ‘Famous’ where there is an interesting part about a shooter … we are then jolted right back to reality with Randy abruptly bragging about nothing.
Ambient and atmospheric ‘ESPIONAGE’ is a noticeable improvement from the dorky, tough guy posturing of the previous tracks until it divulges right back halfway through. I did love the other language used (possibly French?) for hiding the undoubtedly awful lyricism! ‘Ride’ again tries to delve into the more atmospheric side of the project. While starting out harmless and repetitive, it slowly regresses to the choppy and obnoxious sound we have come to loathe. Meaningless jabbering in the background and sliced beats make for an offsetting tone.
To round out the experience and summarize the album, we end on the shapeshifting and jarring ‘Rocketship to God’. The song serves as a mission statement to prove that Randy is in fact just randomly stumbling around. There is no vision with this song, this album or the entire concept of who he is.Randy, I am going to have to side with your mother on this one, “you are crazy” and you are not a Rockstar now.
-Brad Acorn, Kernico Records
