It can’t be easy getting a coherent CD out of a band that simply won’t calm down. And to their credit, nobody tries to rein in Egg Yolk Jubilee on this disc, which captures the band in full anarchic glory. Buy on AmazonBuy on iTunesWhether you’ll join the wild abandon or get worn out by the third track is entirely up to you.
The eleven tracks here cover fractured blues (“Heart Full of Bile”), George Clintonesque cosmic slop (“Space Love”), and speed-metal rap (“WFTB”). Then there are the covers: They get the title of Led Zeppelin’s “No Quarter” slightly wrong (calling it “No Quarters”) and really, they get everything else wrong too: The brass-band funk is a long way from the ominous feel of Zep’s original, and the dramatically recited lyrics would make Robert Plant cringe—but the irreverence makes this one of the few worthwhile Zeppelin covers in years. Zep turns up again three songs later in “The A-Hole Race,” which quotes the guitar solo of “Whole Lotta Love” on the way to another left turn. And there are probably all sorts of quotes in the fourteen-minute finale “A Call For All Demons” (I spotted Ravel’s “Bolero” and the Looney Tunes theme), a brass-band-gone-Sun Ra workout that purges whatever energy the band had left.
They also visit the formative years of New Orleans R&B on the Professsor Longhair composition “No Buts, No Maybes,” which manages to capture the wild spirit of those vintage Ric and Ron sessions. It’s a style that Egg Yolk Jubilee ought to explore further as soon as their musical ADD allows.