Amazon.co.uk Review
Like their white-trash Pennsylvania homeboys in Ween and Dead Milkmen, Bloodhound Gang are offensive, rude, stupid, 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 laddish 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 Coaster features 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, 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 humour 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
CD Description
There must be plenty of suburban white boys like Pennsylvania's Bloodhound Gang who learned about hip-hop from early Beastie Boys records. ONE FIERCE BEER COASTER takes the crude b-boy stance of the Beasties' licenceD TO ILL, piles on DustBrothers-like layers of samples, ups the ante with a bunch of Slayer-ish power-chords, and mouths off like a parent's worst nightmare. Tipper Gore watch out: No subject is above the Gang's juvenile slander, not suicide ("Lift Your Head Up High [And Blow Your Brains Out]"), not cunnilingus ("Kiss MeWhere It Smells Funny"), nothing.
Rapper Jimmy Pop Ali obviously got an "A" in his senior Pop Culture References seminar. Songs are built around '80s dance-floor chants, and the citation list (the Pixies, Chewbacca, Quasimodo) truly never ends. Neither does Ali's sneering attitude or gleeful contempt for every last thing he's sending up. The ultimate joke is having the infamous Vanilla Ice (under his real-life name of Rob van Winkle) drop verses with the gang on "Boom". The group's tongue is so far up its cheek at that point, the only defence is to throw one's hand in the air and go...well, you know. Definitely not for the easily offended.