Now that there’s a brand new offering of Dwarves audio debauchery in our hands, the question once again arises: why is it that HeWhoCanNotBeNamed—the most famous naked punk rocker this side of GG’s mouldering old bones—never seems to have a boner when he plays? Isn’t a floppy, limp dick antithetical to the Dwarves’ brand of lust-engorged teenage testicle rock? You’d think the whole band would be running around with erections that last well over four hours and look like they’re about to suddenly shoot away from their bodies like fat, purple bottle rockets. But boners or not, the Dwarves are back and not a moment too soon. If the swashbuckling lifestyle of drug-addled, booze-fueled, porn-steeped horn-doggery has been recently given a douchey twist by the celebrity Chas. Sheen, the right honorable exemplars/progenitors of that venerable lifestyle have returned to reclaim it and reanimate its bedraggled corpus with psychotic, rutting Yeti Blood, which is twenty-three times stronger than that piss-water Tiger Blood that Mr. Sheen has been peddling.
Since Blood, Guts & Pussy, the Dwarves have been basically giving you, song by song, the option of being beat over the head with a poofy pink wig of cotton candy or a nail-spiked dildo. Personally, I’ve always found the drubbing by dildo to be the most satisfying, on some Neanderthal level or another. And while Born Again does have a few tunes that teeter on the edge of falling into that category of “candy-coated Epitaph-style pop punk,” there are amped up tit-twisting scorchers on this album that would stand up alongside anything off of Blood, Guts & Pussy.
Lyrically the songs are oozing with such blatant self-celebratory, mythologizing cockiness, one can’t help but visualize the old time porn footage of Ron “Hedgehog” Jeremy proudly fellating himself. But if you’ve got the cockiness to do it, then you would almost be a fool not to blow your own horn. This is, after all, the realm of ithyphallic gods and they and their super-charged reproduction organs don’t have to answer to anyone.
It’s possible that you might’ve been expecting something of a Dwarves’ swan song with this disc—a toothless, simpering half-hearted offering—especially after all those rumors about Blag having his clock cleaned by that precious little dork singer from Queens Of The Stone Age. And maybe you thought that the self-described “Jesus Christ of sin and vice” would slink off somewhere and quietly spoon with HeWho for the rest of his days. Not even close. Born Again is a cocked up aural blend of amphetamines and Spanish fly, a white trash pervert’s orgitorium for the ears. Blag and his depraved cohorts have indeed returned and upped the ante. Tesco Vee, it’s your turn now. –Greedy, PO Box 170481, SF, CA 94117