There are times when you are listening to Roundwound Rotosound by Big Shot Lounge and you think there is SOMETHING major happening, something innovative, something that will change everything.
You harp on the lyrics.
“Inside me I feel like there’s a hundred guitars…And the feedback is taking all that I’ve worked for…But sometimes it feels like there’s nothing at all” and you add the words up in your brain over and over but the sums are not quite the same and it might physically hurt. What do Eric Arnouville and Grant Lambert even mean by their umpteenth project together? Weren’t they just on a press stomp for their newly launched Ogus Network just the other day? Are there such things as these stacked McMansions with garages in Metairie that they sing of in “Mansion Maniacs?”
Singing in unison on “Boneless Freaks,” Big Shot Lounge bill themselves sometimes as Soundass and Eric Arnouville (director and star of 2017’s Minutia and also known as Feck) has sworn he has no intention of improving guitar and yet…he has and he did.
Big Shot Lounge, when you add up the evidence and riddles they leave on their Bandcamp, bills themselves as “two ethereal creatures” who have a “gift” of reinventing “the wheel time and time again.” Is this Tenacious D 7.0? It’s just too corporeal to be just that…too much confusion about where the heads and mouths and sounds and ears go. You might wonder, as a listener, if you have heard “Money Meanie” somewhere before but “Rodeo Romeo,” the droning doo-wopper on this 12-tracker makes you certain it’s brand spanking new.
Perhaps the biggest treat of Roundworm Rotosound is the effortless way that a borderline post-punk track can flow so neatly into a doo-wop heart melter with freakishly good performance art about the dangers of capitalism and benefits of weak wrists. I was told once that’s what “mastering” is and if that is, in fact, the correct definition, Big Shot Lounge have mastered the art of putting together and album that’s a commentary simultaneously on everything and yet nothing all at once.
Older musicians, especially the New Orleans crowd, might want to instantaneously sit this album out but it cannot be denied that the piano, percussion, guitar, and horns are proof that Big Shot Lounge can hang with the best of them. To ignore the powerhouse of BSL would be like Judas Priest snubbing Tenacious D as a tour mate. BSL doesn’t take themselves so very seriously but seriously enough to put three solid years of blood, nerve, and sinew into an album. Originally set to debut April 1, the duo staved off the release for reasons we’ll never know but were obviously important.
When Arnouville and Lambert sing “I used to dance in the ballroom before it went up in flames. People came from all over. We put on masquerades. We did the Shoemaker Shuffle. Hell, we even wrote the song And before you ask, we played the music loud and it stayed that way all damn night long. But that was many years ago and things are different now…Might call my friend Dr. Pepper…So so so soda speak” in “Soda Speak,” it almost seems like sympathy for the elders who just can’t understand their commitment to being ambitious musical ragamuffins.
Because let’s face it, these are two young guys in hip clothes doing everything this Crescent City tells them not to do which is ultimately just to be themselves.
