Eat Plastic! by Abel Ashes

Like many debut albums, Eat Plastic! was the culmination of years of struggle to be heard. From plucking the strings of a Stella with a warped neck under a Tulie Creek cottonwood tree to disrupting folky open mics in San Diego with a crackly amp & Squire with a floating bridge, Abel Ashes was always destined to fail & determined to kick destiny's arrogant ass.

Featuring the talents of Japanese American drummer Marcos Fernandes (Trummerflora Collective, Wormhole Effect, Accretions), mysterious keyboardist and fellow New Mexican Fayd Ogolon with guests Max Vazin, Clare Vazin, Meyer Hirsch (Buddy Rich Big Band, Joe Byrd, Gene Estes), and Eric Hensel; Eat Plastic! is fun & challenging, political & silly, emotional & irreverent, noisy & melodic, with complexity & simplicity & dark & light fighting over each absurd moment.

Often compared to early Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, Sonny Sharrock, Primus, & Tom Waits, but just as influenced by Midnight Oil, Mike Keneally, Living Colour, & Fela Kuti; Eat Plastic! is a dark comedy, jazz rock, post punk, free funk a laugh at a highway full of dimwitted, godfearing, reckless-driving, drug addled, shopaholic cretins frantically trying to eject a beautifully cathartic CD so they can dial in some music that sucks as much as they do.

Featuring Marcos Fernandes, Fayd Ogolon, Meyer Hirsch, and Eric G. Hensel, Eat Plastic is an album that exists somewhere between 1960s free jazz, 1970s garage funk, 1980s activist rock, 1990s alternative rock, and the early 2000s San Diego experimental music scene.

Reviewers, fans, and detractors have compared the album to The Mothers of Invention, Sonny Sharrock, Primus, and Captain Beefheart.

On the original “Eat Plastic” album, it is apparent that Ashes filled his head with the sounds of early Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, before graduating onto the likes of The Residents. The opening instrumental “Stop and Go Traffic” is an excellent FZ style marimba and percussion-led jazz-funk workout; the extended introduction to “The Revolution Is Making Me Dizzy” grooves along in similar vein. Meanwhile, “The CEO” features rapidly changing time signatures, before Ashes gives us his opening vocal shot, an impossibly deep and gravelly Beefheartean baritone, which includes one very long sustained bass note. The lyrics of this song (“I am the CEO / and I’m gonna whip your ass”), “Food In My Gut” (“Sometimes I wish that I was dead / instead I crawl back in my head”), and “Commercials” (“Here’s some commercials, here’s something else / here’s some commercials, you stupid ass”), contain post-modern satire for the working classes, the former featuring funky bass playing from Max Vazin, the latter some gloriously edgy guitar riffing. “Amtrak Out of Orange County” is a nightmare train journey, with noisy and atonal electronic soundscapes courtesy of Fayd. By comparison, “Goddess/Godless” is a gentle (if markedly twisted) guitar and piano ballad, with one reassuring and repeated verse: “I will have no fear / with the goddess lying next to me”. The spoken word delivery and avant-garde backing track of “Lemming Sunset“, the final track on the original album, calls to mind Sun Ra reciting cosmic utterances over the top of Rick Wright‘s “Sysyphus” – certainly not the kind of thing you would use to open a party!

- Aural Innovations #42 (May 2011)

Born in a cult in El Paso, hitchhiked cross-country as a baby, grew up with mom in the shadow of the A bomb in New Mexico, vacations in San Diego with dad, played open mics with a fucked up old Stella, experimental music shows, lectures, open mics, and dead-end jobs galore, lived in LA and SF, 7 years in Kentucky, 4 years in Tunisia with my wife who was paralyzed in car crash, back in SD, CA now.

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