Orchid - The Mouths of Madness
It can be argued that Orchid’s Mark Thomas Baker is a bit of a trendfucking cunt. In the mid-’80s, when the Bay Area was booming, he had a Thrash band called Rabid. They never took off, and anyone who’s actually heard 1986’s Thrash Metal Attack compilation can vouch for why. Fast-forward to the early ’90s and the explosion of Seattle’s Alternative Rock scene. Nevermind, Ten, Badmotorfinger, and Dirt are flying off the shelves at a rate that dudes playing distorted guitars will never see again. Around this time, it just so happened that Baker resurfaced in a Grunge act called Liquid Sky. What a coincidence! I’d like to be able to give you the skinny on how bad Liquid Sky was —they did have a gay enough name to get signed— but I’ve never heard them. Nobody has, and perhaps that’s all we really need to know. After one more failed attempt at stardom in the short-lived Hard Rock group Bomber (gee, I wonder who they tried to sound like), MTB threw up two middle fingers to the music biz and walked off into the sunset, not to be heard from again for nearly a decade. “Screw you guys…home.” I can only assume the guitarist spent that hiatus eagerly waiting… watching… anticipating the next big thing. “Which bandwagon looks like the safest landing?” Then it finally appeared to him, like a vision in so many dreams: ripping off Black Sabbath. “That shit’s easy to do, never gets old, and people seem to eat it up! Where’s this been my whole life?” A call was made to ex-Bomber frontman Theo Mindell and Orchid was born. Listening to their sophomore full-length, it becomes quickly and clearly evident that this is the work of a songwriter who’s never had an original idea in his life. There isn’t a single arrangement on this entire hour-long album that hasn’t already been written by Tony Iommi & Co. The Mouths of Madness would at least be fun in a trivia kind of way —as in trying to guess which Black Sab songs Orchid borrow their riffs and solos from— if you didn’t have to deal with Mindell’s wretched Sunset Strip howl. This man’s voice is the sound of leopard-skin spandex pants, and his words are so obviously cut-and-pasted from other bands’ lyric sheets it’s ridiculous. Not sure if “Loving Hand of God” is about worshipping the king of Jews or a vicious men’s-restroom glory-hole handy-j, but either way I refuse to partake. However, this musical Mr. Pibb isn’t just another completely worthless album that no human being needs to hear. It’s a beacon of hope for all creatively-challenged musicians the world over. If you just hang in there long enough, and steal the right shit from the right people at the right time, you could end up moving 400-600 units for Nuclear Blast someday. Never stop following other people’s dreams.
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