How do you describe or categorise this? It’s not exactly a concept album, although in a way it is, being an album based around ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’ - not the book, but the 1971 film starring Gene Wilder (note, not Tim Burton’s remake, which this is something of a reaction against). But then, it’s not a soundtrack album, either, and makes no attempt to be, despite the songs corresponding, in the main, with those on the actual film soundtrack. It is a covers album? Well, in part perhaps, but as the band explain, ‘as opposed to just going in and recording the songs and playing them the way they are in the film, we twisted them up a bit…twisted them up a lot.’
They sure did. It’s not so much ‘wonka’ as wonky’. Very wonky at that. Personally, I strongly dislike both film versions, but then, I really dislike Gene Wilder. But this, this is something else, something way out there.
The version of ‘Candy Man’ is dark and warped and the diametric opposite of the sweet, swinging bubblegum pop of the original (and it’s even further from Sammy Davis Jr.). Hell, it sounds like the tape’s melting, some kind of chocolate equivalent of a landscape filled with Salvador Dali’s clocks. Indeed, while Mel Stuart’s film accentuated some of the darker, weirder aspects of Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book, Primus’ musical reimagining takes the darkness and weirdness to a whole other level. ‘Golden Ticket’ bounces and thumps along to a big tribal beat and some psychotically pitch-shifted vocals, and the atmospheric shifts on ‘Pure Imagination’ are half Disney, half nightmare. The familiar Oompah-Loompah theme is weirded out to the max – by which I mean it’s really quite disturbing, while still being entirely recognisable.
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It’s perhaps an odd choice of material for the first full-length recording from the definitive Primus line-up – Les Claypool, guitarist Larry LaLonde, and drummer Tim Alexander – in nearly 20 years, but then, this is Primus, a band who’ve never done things by the book or taken an obvious approach. And for that, we applaud them.
Primus Online
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