I've always dreaded reviewing a Fireballs of Freedom record for quite a few reasons. One is that it seems like their tunes and the aesthetic they propagate seems to beg for excessive use of superlatives, and I'm not too keen on that style of reviewing. Another reason is that, as kind of a dickhead contrarian, I feel a strong compulsion to distance myself from the cult of personality that has surrounded the FOF their entire existence, although I do like them all very much personally and think very highly of them. A third reason, and I'm probably gonna get run out of town on heresy charges here, but I find that their albums —their recorded output since moving to Portland— have never done much for me. Not that I don't think they're great at what they do, just that that type of thing ain't really my bag, you dig? However, I can attest to very much digging on this Greasy Retrospective CD. I think the main thing that's setting it apart from their latter-day Estrus/Empty output is that this older (mid-90s) stuff finds them at a time when they were a little more scaled down, before they had turned pro, so to speak. Their tunes were much more irreverent and had far less producerly goop slathered on them. This older shit has a welcome goofballian bent that is often missing on their later stuff, and you don't find yourself feeling obligated to go, "Holy shit, that is some over-the-top dirty rock and roll, bro!" In fact, comparing the new stuff to some of the older tracks, you'd hardly recognize them as the same band. Back then they were much more given to funk-sounding stuff and lots of chicka-chicka and even the occasional high-velocity punk rock foray. It seems like the FOF started taking it a lot more seriously once they moved from Missoula to Portland in '98 (?) and getting national attention (and who would blame them for that?), and so on their Estrus/Empty stuff the emphasis is on attempting to pummel the listener into submission with this relentless and shrill juggernaut that leaves little room for much else. This selfsame juggernaut one finds on, say, Total Fucking Blowout, I've often thought, also kinda tends to occlude the preternatural band chemistry that was so evident earlier in their career. The chemistry is indeed there, but it's necessarily playing second fiddle to that dirty rock volume conquistador thing you get on their more recent releases. However, I do take into account the fact that the FOF are dedicated players of The Music and are probably some of the most goal-driven and ambitious sons of bitches I ever met in the rock-o-sphere. And I think it's fairly safe to say that if they'd stayed in Missoula playing songs about sticking drumsticks up their asses and jamming on the theme from "People's Court" for half an hour, in no way would they have acheieved the level of national success and hard-won recognition that they have. And far be it for me to begrudge them any success they've had. So in this way, I feel that, rather than another vertex in the FOF trajectory, Greasy Retrospective is more of a valentine to old-timey fans and scene interlopers of yesteryear. "Viva El Gato" and "Sno King" have a comfortable place in my heart, and I'll be damned if "Vonferno" didn't get me a little misty-eyed this morning. Likewise, I really dug the liner notes by Josh Vanek, who, in my esteemed opinion, should do liner notes more often. There's a passage therein (hey, wow, that's only one letter away from "theremin!") where he talks about how there's nary a BBQ or party in Missoula where there's not a round of Kelly Gately imitations, and my experience is that that is very true, and I'm glad J-Vo acknowledged it in these liner notes for posterity. For the uninitiated: FOF singer/guitarist/raconteur Kelly Gately has a very distinctive speaking style that is quite captivating. It's this rapid-fire spew of jumbled, almost unintelligible stream-of-consciousness babble punctuated with "itsliketotallyfuckin'" and "fugginexactly!!!" and much raucous laughter and backslapping. The most remarkable thing about his diction is that he can say an entire paragraph, and you, the listener, can discern maybe three or four of the words he's said, and yet it's still hugely entertaining to listen to him. It's this garbled spray of bizarre colloquialisms and on-the-spot Kellyisms that I'll try to approximate here: (garbled)LikeTotallyFuggin(garbled)IndianFryBread(garbled)Fuckin' (garbled)Totally(garbled)LikeFishStick(garbled)AndFuggin(garbled) OhIKnowTotallyFuckingGuysPeppered(garbled)FugginTotalCriscoDisco Another remarkable thing about Kelly's diction is its apparent infectiousness. Within a year of him moving to Missoula in '93 or so, there were a handful of ten or twelve guys, and even a couple girls, whose own diction had transmogrified into the Kelly patois, sheerly by dint of his vast charisma. This was kind of surreal, as you can imagine, a bunch of people having suddenly adopted the exact same speech peculiarity, but to my knowledge, it continues unabated to this day in Portland and probably Missoula. Sometimes I think he should do voice-overs or read books on tape or something as a second career just because it's so amusing to listen to him. But dang it Bobby, if there's one reason you should loop over to the WäntageUSA site and order you up a copy post haste, it's the inclusion of the video made by Andy Smetanka for "Out of My Head." Some real tasty Super 8 (the camera, not the motel) band footage interlarded with some peculiar stock footage that I believe Andy found at a garage sale. A hunk of pure genius is what that is. Hitch your wagon to Andy's rising star now, so you can prop your young'uns up on your knee and say you saw his early stuff back in the day. Oh, and P.S.: I've always thought that Art Chantry was a great pick for the FOF album covers, but I have to hereupon raise a celebratory glass of TheraFlu to the cover of Greasy Retrospective, done up by Mr. Greg Twigg. Real real high-end product, that.