king of the crop 7"
[2006, skulltones]

there’s something so undeniably fun about listening to someone else’s jams. not only do you not know where the song is going, but the knowledge that those actually on the recording had no idea either makes it all the more exciting. building your entire discography around this, however, can be challenging. thank the gods of ganja that midwest über-proliferates lambsbread can handle the challenge like no other.
lambsbread call ohio home where they somehow manage to balance smoking weed by the pound and releasing a slew of tapes and cd-rs. information on them is scarce except that they run the mostly tape label maim & disfigure which provides an outlet for a majority of their releases.

“king of the crop” is lambsbread’s first foray into the world of the seven inch, a format that doesn’t quite lend itself to the concept of “free rock” or a “jam band”. most jams would just be getting started in the time that one side of a seven inch (a 45 no less!) allots. lesser bands would falter, even fail miserably, but not lambsbread. they’ve taken everything we have come to love about their extended compositions and condensed them into three brief, (dare i say?) “punk rock” blasts. these three unnamed tracks are heavy on blown-out percussion and faux-noodley guitar work without straying too far into “free rock” territory. it’s party music for dirty acid-heads. nothing but pure heaviness. one flaw becomes apparent at the end of it all, though. while brevity was necessary for the format, it seems that lambsbread could have given us a little more in terms of length: the record clocks in at less than five minutes.

skulltones pressed 300 copies of this slab, but they’ve all been swiped. so keep your fingers crossed for another pressing, maybe with a few additional outtakes from the bong-session that spawned these tracks.

King Of The Crop A2

reviewed by bortron