OLD - Old Lady Drivers (1988)
Bit of a preface here. Yes this record has plenty of cheese...and you know what, that's just fine. If you can't embrace cheese in your metal / indie **** / post-rock / whatever the ****, then you haven't listened to enough music and take yourselves too seriously. Period. You gotta think outside the box and consider the appeal. For instance, I love grindcore and industrial and avant-garde noise rock almost as much as I love The Doobie Brothers, glam metal, smooth jazz and goofy 90's New Age. That's what we call a wide spectrum, folks. When you get to that point, you'll have achieved true enlightenment like Buddha.
I'm been familiar with OLD for quite some time, though more with their later albums such as the phenomenal
Formula (1995) and the previously mentioned
Lo Flux Tube from 1991. While this is definitely a grindcore parody with bizarre elderly fixations at a time when genre had still barely begun it's slimy crawl out of the sewers of the underground, the inclusion of guys like Jason Everman on bass seems rather prescient considering where some of these guys would go on to in the future: you can hear traces here and there of the kind of stuff Devin Townsend, Mike Patton and countless others in the bizarro-metal universe would indulge in over the following two decades. The Eric Clapton cover in particular is rather amusing.
While my personal enjoyment of this probably wouldn't amount to a seven compared to their future albums, I'll give it a solid
7.5/10 for influence and ingenuity.
