Primus: Brown Album

When Primus first hit it big, its music was a wildly unpredictable mixture of dizzying thrash, cartoonish quirkiness and the best bass playing since the emergence of Rush's Geddy Lee. But every Primus album since Sailing The Seas Of Cheese—Pork Soda, Tales From The Punch Bowl, the new Brown Album—has devolved ever further into noodling and silliness. (Side projects like Les Claypool & The Holy Mackerel haven't been much better.) Primus has never specialized in melody, The Brown Album is so lumbering and one-note, it's hard to imagine it even finding an audience with the geeks who thought "Winona's Big Brown Beaver" was a stitch. You've probably heard the insufferably repetitive, faux-clever single, "Shake Hands With Beef," on the radio by now. It's an embarrassing self-parody, but it's probably the best track on Brown Album. And while frontman Les Claypool is an extremely talented bassist capable of eccentric wit, he's rapidly becoming one of the world's most intolerable vocalists.