siLLy puPPy
By the time the band that began as Old Lady Drivers got to its third album THE MUSICAL DIMENSIONS OF SLEASTAK, not only had they abbreviated the moniker to O.L.D. but dropped the punctuation altogether and was simply OLD. Add to that the comedic grindcore of the first two albums had been totally replaced by a bizarre new style of progressive psychedelic space rock. Along for the ride from the second album “Lo Flux Tube” where the industrial elements that ebbed and flowed. Add some post-rock / metal elements to the mix and what OLD dropped was one of the strangest metal albums in the year 1993. In retrospect these albums by OLD would point the way to the more extreme experiments of James Plotkin’s future band Khanate. This album is a bit on the long side at over 66 minutes but nobody could ever accuse OLD of not being adventurous.
For those not in the know, SLEASTAK is a misspelling of the lizard men called the Sleestak from the early 1970s kid’s show “Land of the Lost,” a live action show with animated dinosaurs and other strange creatures narrating the tale of a man and his two kids who canoed down a waterfall and ended up in a prehistorical world only also filled with aliens and magical devices. A bizarre show which seemed to inspire a bizarre album from this trio that consisted of James Plotking (guitars, keyboards, programming), Alan Dubin (vocals) and Herschel Gaer (bass). Everything on THE MUSICAL DIMENSIONS OF SLEASTAK went for the extremely experimental realms with industrial music sounds presented in off-kilter progressive time signatures and freaky electronic sounds oozing out of every nook and cranny of silence.
Like the extra-dimensional reptile race from the 1970s Saturday morning entertainment world, this album is very much like navigating multiple dimensions. Even though the grindcore elements had been completely replaced with a less frenetic style of psychedelic post-metal, Dubin still retained the blood curdling high pitched raspy screams from the grind era. The guitars on the other hand mostly provide the subordinate sounds to keep the album firmly in the metal world but the main gist of the album is to craft freaky psychedelic electronic sounds that often erupt into a cacophonous din of swirling turbulence while the guitar performs some angularity from the outer limits. Like post-rock bands such as Godspeed You! Black Emperor, THE MUSICAL DIMENSIONS OF SLEASTAK is a slow drifting kind of album that features an oft monotonous march through time with various jittery elements bursting in and then fluttering out and sometimes changing musical styles completely.
This album is abrasive as hell. Sure the metal guitar is smooth as silk but the album exceeds in crafting an unnerving mix of space freakery with shrill tones and unexpected sonic assaults. I can only presume that the mood setting for this album was to create an air of horror as if one were really stranded in some extra-dimensional prehistoric realm and encountered a group of the Sleestak in their natural habitat. The TV show is available on YouTube for viewing and although a bit cheesy by today’s standards was actually quite innovative as it was crafted by Gene Roddenberry of Star Trek fame. In many ways this album reminds me of the Japanese band Boredoms would find success in with albums like “Super æ” and “Vision Creation Newsun” except OLD still retained extreme metal aspects which would be dropped altogether on the band’s final release “Formula.”
This is avant-garde metal all the way and utterly uncategorizable as well sounding like nothing else in the metal universe that i’m aware of. Whether this appeals to someone or not will depend entirely on one’s open-mindedness and ability to navigate the interdimensional sonic highway that OLD has constructed on this bizarre psychedelic freak show. This is the kind of mind-warping music that i love the most so i am certainly the target audience although i’ve only come to explore this band in recent years. This album was way ahead of its time as this style of metal mixed with electronica and psychedelic rock wouldn’t become accepted for another two decades or so. All in all i find this one to sound like a metal band that fell into a wormhole and this is the soundtrack to such an interdimensional journey. Personally i love this!