Album review: Fuzigish by Fuzigish

29 Apr 2022 - 11:13

I thought Fuzigish had reached their expiration date and gone off to do other things like hike mountains and hills and ride bicycles with frosty hair and shaved legs in quaint European cities where load shedding isn’t a thing. This is what literally hundreds of South African rock musicians have been doing, at least for the past decade. Leaving, for whatever reason: a declining alternative rock scene, family life and rearing children in less violent scenarios. Making money instead of making crazy friends in dives and the now absent live venues. This may be the common-sense thing to do, but it’s also a cop-out, and anyone who knows what they’re talking about will tell you that keeping a music scene going, underground or otherwise, takes sacrifice and persistence.

Fuzigish: Thomas Hughes, Jay Bones, William ‘Big Willy’ Bishop and Malcolm ‘Rockwell’ King.

It’s for this reason that the Johannesburg band leads off its new eponymous album with ‘Persistence’, a track signalling to new and old fans alike that 25 years after first appearing on the scene, Fuzigish isn’t quite done with making the music that solidified it as South Africa’s premier punk-rock outfit. The song also sets in motion the eclectic nature of this collection: it uses an Eastern scale, has a ‘German’ sonic approach, the drumbeats are replete with colour unlike the many punk bands out there that employ ‘rhythmic brown’, and there are these typically puckish South African brass lines that induce images of dung beetle Highveld bush fire parties where everyone is in a baffled but happy delirium.

The brass section, courtesy of William ‘Big Willy’ Bishop, is so important for this band that if it were muted, Fuzigish would need to rethink their whole approach. Of course, Fuzigish is categorised as a two-tone/ska band, but Big Willy’s trombone (he should start a Balkan brass band called that), trumpet and tuba lines are so animated and well-articulated, they give Fuzigish a great deal of its soul and heartbeat. There is a comedic madness, a Freudian Id, to this musician’s approach to music – it’s natural and impulsive and teeming with unabated excitement, and it’s exactly what gives Fuzigish an edge over other bands. If you were at Mieliepop this year, you saw Fuzigish wipe the floor with pretty much every other rock group at the festival, largely because of Big Willy’s onstage charisma as a mad trombonist and rabble-rousing backing singer. And this was after he hobbled on wielding crutches following an accident earlier that week in which he dislocated his hip, and proceeded to make his presence known by playing the tune from the Jurassic Park gate scene where Jeff Goldblum looks up and says, “What do they got in there, King Kong?” No, Jeff, they’ve got Big Willy eating the T-rex alive!

But it’s not only Big Willy who plays a pivotal role in this band; each of the four musicians takes up a central position in this make-up. Extract any one of them and Fuzigish would be reduced to a pale imitation of itself. Take for example Malcolm ‘Rockwell’ King’s Madness-inspired bassline on the no-nonsense ‘N.S.D.P’ (National Slam Disaster Plan), which gives the song the opportunity to let loose in the choruses while being playful in the verses to complement the satire.

Frontman Jay Bones’ socio-political commentary, sarcasm and clever wordplay is all over this album. Whereas many COVID releases got too serious and portentous, Fuzigish have remained even-tempered and positive, less perhaps for the sobering ‘Man Down’, where the lyrics talk about how ordinary people get trampled out by avaricious assholes. The song is reminiscent of early U2, helped to reach this nostalgic, leather-mullet aesthetic with delayed guitar leads and a Dublin hangover bassline in the verses.

On ‘Believer’, the album’s first single, Fuzigish poke fun at the post-truth conspiratorial absurdities of the pandemic (that’s at least one interpretation here). The song is also the canvas for an outlandishly comical video with asteroids, nebulas, space sharks, and a wormhole synched to the psychedelic skank section of the track. All of this while Jay Bones runs around in a HAZMAT suit like a lobotomised 16-bit videogame character from the early ‘90s.

Some 12 years ago, when South Africa was gripped by World Cup fever, I reviewed a cheesy Finnish folk metal band playing in Johannesburg where a young drummer, Thomas Hughes, made a big impression on the crowd with his technical proficiency and metronomic heft. He played with two bands on the night – Haggis and Bong, a kilt-wearing Scottish bagpipe metal band, and the explosive All Forlorn – and a few years later went on to join deathcore madmen Vulvodynia. In Fuzigish, where he’s been playing since 2012, Hughes allows the rest of the musicians to do whatever they want by knowing that behind his drumming are years of metal chops and syncopated imagination. And on this record, Hughes flaunts his propensity for versatility and restraint through tracks like ‘Go’, which is arguably the album’s strongest for its vocal performance, choice of tempo and general FU attitude.

Listen to Fuzigish's self-titled album here.