Band : Five Dollar Priest
Album title : Five Dollar Priest
Label : Bang! Records
Distributor : Sonic Rendezvous
Release date : July 2008
Release : CD

This New York based band is a freaky conglomerate of somewhat known musicians (singer/ percussion & harp player Ron Ward of Speedball Baby; guitarist/ Noise maker Norman Westberg of Swans; bassist & backing singer George Porfiris of Heroine Sheiks; and drummer Bo Bert of Chrome Cranks, Knoxville Girls, Pussy Galore, and Sonic Youth fame) augmented with the twisted clarinet playing Patrick Holmes. I'm sorry to say, but I found no info relevant to the band's formation date and former achievements.

However, for the recordings of this, their debut full-length, the quinted was able to make use of no less than 6 guest musicians, the most important of which soundwise, has to be saxophone & keyboard player James Chance...as his sax is used in quite a few of the songs. As far as reputation goes though, Jon Spencer is perhaps the best known person, here playing the theremin. Additional guest folk are backing vocalist Christina Campanella, guitarist Jack Martin (on 3 songs), slide guitarist Matt Verta Ray, and standup bassist Eric Eble.

Together they produce a truly wacky and slightly Jazz-influenced Blues Rock which they themselves dubbed "NYC Mindblower Noise Blues", and I can tell y'all that this wacky music will indeed blow your minds...as will the totally screwy vocals, by the way! On top of a somewhat repetitive foundation, you'll frequently find one or two guys going nuts in a fake improvisational (because I'm sure it's all written and arranged to come out exactly the way it does) filling up of the whole.  To complete the craziness, there's Ward's weird vocal stylings which are closer to a sorts of hoarse but melodic spoken word thing than actual singing. Totally wacky, but it works to bring an additional loony touch to the mad whole (and I'm not using all these synonyms to the "nutty" state of being of this band in their disadvantage, you know, quite on the contrary!).Check it out for yourselves by surfing to myspace.com/fivedollarpriest, where the guys posted 4 of the album's songs. You'll also find two videos, by the way...which I haven't seen yet, because...and you'll find me using this excuse a in other reviews as well...I had to do my fact-finding just before going on a short vacation and didn't have time to check out everything personallly. I dó hope you enjoy them, though.

As far as the album goes (which is also to be issued in a vinyl version), this is definitely "Best Album Of 2008"-list material in my book (and just to showcase my fondness of this outfit's music, I'll let you know I'm ordering my vinyl copy of the album ASAP).

98/100

Tony.