As George Brigman rumbles and rolls his way through "Rags in Skull," his first album of all new material in 25 years, the listener has to wonder what the guitarist has been up to for the past couple decades. It sounds like he scheduled his 2006 dates in the recording studio way back in the '80s, then proceeded to lock himself in his dark, dank basement with a pair of perpetually agitated junkyard dogs and didn't break out of the bulwark until he felt he had tortured himself enough to lay down some of the darkest, meanest guitar parts possible.
"Rags in Skull" is the rare album that revels in its heaviness and isn't afraid to let the riffs run wild. Some time soon after he picked up a guitar you probably could have said that Brigman played the blues, but what he does now is too loud and destructive; it would send shivers to the old blues legends' hunched-over spines, and it's way too tough to be compared to bland blues fanboys like Clapton.
Mississippi Delta demi-god Robert Johnson may have sold his soul to the devil so he could play the guitar, but Brigman, unlike uninspired virtuosos like Stevie Ray Vaughn, knows that just because you lost your soul doesn't mean you can't play with passion.
"So This Is Life," a kiss-off to the entire human race, shows off this energy immediately, featuring a guitar part like a dirty serrated knife covered in dried blood, layered over a bouncing beat that's part Aerosmith and part '80s arena metal. "And suicide keeps 'em satisfied/ It's not what its cracked up to be," Brigman intones in his fairly unremarkable voice that still somehow manages to convey a feeling of looming doom.
"Goin' to Pieces" starts out plain old evil like a Black Sabbath tune, but then Brigman finds an almost funky groove in the devilish growling of his guitar. The soloing is a total rock and roll fantasy, flying across the frets like he's Eddie Van Halen's evil twin. Then Brigman goes to a party with the devil in "Somebody Put Milk in My Eye" and it doesn't even faze him; his flawless guitar playing refuses to miss a beat even when Lucifer threatens to "burn your soul right away."
"Some of My Best Friends are Snakes" could be Axl Rose's band for a moment in the beginning, and if his "Chinese Democracy" tracks sounded half this good it would almost make up for the wait (almost) - but then it gets too ominous to be the Sunset Strip golden boys.
Brigman sounds totally stuck in the '70s on this album, but still manages to let loose, heavyweight hard rock riffs that knock out present day contenders. Nausea inducing bands like Nickelback and Hinder (maybe the only truly indefensible music out there today) think heavy means you've got to be stodgy and lumbering. Wrapped around the fret board burning hard rock guitar work on this album are garlands of ear catching, foot stomping glam rock, metal and psychedelia. Brigman's "Borderline" swings and swaggers through lyrics about how "so many friends are dead," showing how Brigman is as heavy as they come, but he never feels weighed down.
The album closes with "Swell," a show-off guitar instrumental that starts off sounding like a drone track, before Brigman starts a sorrowful solo. The drone continues to ebb and flow back and forth under the guitar, leaving a feeling of foreboding. The elegiac guitar saves us at the last minute from the album's almost overpowering gloom, lifting the listener above the shifting, droning darkness. But when you find yourself at the end of Brigman's tour through his torn up and dragged down world, you find yourself only wanting to go back down for more.
