LP Review: "Kali Yuga" by Maharaja

Kali Yuga

Certainly Mitch Hedberg has been mentioned on these pages before. If not, allow me to pontificate upon the greatest comedian of all time.

Hedberg was big enough to headline theaters and not clubs, but not big enough to star on a sitcom, but no one's really sure if he even wanted to.

He was smart enough to write down his odd views of the world. Like, his great joke: "I'm pretty good at tennis, but I'll never be as good as the wall."

Seriously that's utter genius.

More than just jokes that came out of left field, he strove to perform a different show each evening. He might hide in the curtains while telling jokes, or hang his jacket on the mic stand in order to confuse the spotlight man. He'd kneel down reading jokes out of a notebook.

Maharaja

On his posthumous album, Do You Believe In Gosh he said the now infamous line, "Try and stump me, Phil." It's not really infamous, but let's assume that it is.

Music and stand up comedy are really similar forms of art. In both cases, a performer has to bare their soul in front of an audience.

Too many musicians follow the tried and true paths. Consider the four chord song.... It's a small percentage of songwriters who want their audience to tell them go ahead and stump me.

Dayton, OH's own Maharaja is band that's simply playing the song inside their soul and the fact that it's perfectly insane, well, all the better really.

On its basest level, Kali Yuga is Melvins style sludge metal.

When reviewing an album, the common thread is usually my personal starting point. What makes this band's songs an album? What is the glue binding these sounds together.

In this case, it's the swirling bass guitar. That by itself is enough to make a band crazy. The first question is to wonder who told the bass player about swirling vibrato? The second is why wasn't he beaten, mugged, and then given enough vodka to erase this from his memory?

Then the rest of the band approves this???

Well, apparently, as they say, the Dude (read: Band) abides and here we have this band based around (pun intended) this unique sounding rhythm section.

In a world that's full of stoner, death, fuzz, etc metal bands that all want to be Jerry Seinfeld, take a minute and listen to the bands that want to be Mitch Hedberg instead, like Maharaja.

Release: 9/22/17
Label: DIY
Formats: CD/Digital
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