Album Review: Fishbone "Give a Monkey a Brain and He'll Swear He's the Center of the Universe"

Los Angeles' FISHBONE are one of the wildest, most energetic bands I've ever seen live. A shame, then, that their sprawling array of musical styles (covering anything from hip-hop, ska, reggae, and soul, through to metal) doesn't quite translate in the studio.

My main gripe with this album is that it lacks any real coherence, with the song structures going awry on frustrating tangents.

There's also too much going on in the songs, resulting in the whole picture being cluttered up. Despite that, the positive message and subliminal melody of "Black Flowers" and the twisted funk of "Lemon Meringue" do them justice. But, on the whole, this is a disappointment.

GRADE C

Mark Liddell

Riff Raff

July, 1993

Revenge...?

Riff Raff was a legendary rock magazine based in London in the late 1980s and 1990s. Edited by the ultimate music biz insider, Mark Crampton, and employing such talents as Mark Blake, Jerry Ewing, Mike Harris, Paul Smith, Chris Collingwood, Alan McCrorie, Simon Robinson, Lyn Guy, Anna Marx, Nick Douglas, Marion Garden, Peter "Grunty" Grant, Joe "The Crow" Mackett, Billy "The Kluck" Kulke, and, lastest and mostest, the incredible Liddell Brothers, Mark (a.k.a. "El Perro") and Colin (a.k.a. "Der Fly"). Unfortunately, Riff Raff was just too R n' R for its own good. A genuine working class rock mag, written, edited, and translated into 16 European languages in a drug-N-Jack-D-fuelled haze, often on the back of motorbikes, with spell checking by our staff of attentive rock bimbos (chosen purely for their blondeness and big knockers), it soon fell behind more trainspotterly, nerdish, and politically correct publications like Q, Kerrang, Mojo, Metal Hammer, and Horse & Hound. This website is an archive and kind of shrine dedicated to the writing of its greatest writers, some of whom, luckily for the Rock Kosmos, still continue to write about music. This is the REVENGE of Riff Raff...Rock on!