One Fierce Beer Coaster
Like their white-trash Pennsylvania homeboys in Ween and Dead Milkmen, Bloodhound Gang are offensive, rude, stoopid, and vigorously gutter-minded, but they're better off for knowing what they are. And having admitted it, they also happen to be surprisingly clever and pretty damn funny. The group's second album,One Fierce Beer Coaster(yes, the cover is designed as a beer coaster--a nod to the band's frat-boy constituency), is full of smart lines, great hooks, and creative arranging. Not one of the record's 10 originals misses its mark. Unlike Bloodhound Gang's 1995 debut,Use Your Fingers, which was essentially a sample-heavy rap album with rock tendencies,Beer Coasterfeatures a new backing band for more of a live rock sound, with muscle-bound funk touches and rapping (think 311 or Cake). But while the new Gang members are perhaps more in tune with current rock radio styles, Jimmy Pop remains an MC at heart--enough so, at least, to cover Run-DMC's "It's Tricky" and then duet with Vanilla Ice (on "Boom") and ape Ol' Dirty Bastard. If you doubt his mic skills, check the rapid-fire U.S. tour in "Going Nowhere Slow": Pop names 72 cities in under 30 seconds. Overshadowing both music and vocal chops, though, are the lyrics. Full of TV namedropping (Emmanuel Lewis), shopping lists (No-Doz, Rolos), and gleeful juxtapositions (Jack Kerouac and Gilbert Gottfried in the same line), Pop's rhymes are dense enough to be topical as well: various songs cover feminine hygiene, suicide as population control, acting gay as a way to meet women, and so on. The humor is a guilty pleasure for the politically incorrect. As Jimmy says, "I'm an Alka-Seltzer ... You're a sea gull"--and if you get the joke, you deserve to hear the rest of the record.--Roni Sarig