The Fleshies: Scrape the Walls

You know, everything was going fine on Scrape the Walls, the third album from this Oakland, California band, until Jello Biafra showed up.

Until that point, the record hummed along, with 11 garage-influenced punk jams that flew by like some lost relic from the Bay Area, circa 1979. The songs were short, rowdy, tuneful and sharp.

And then Jello arrived and the proceedings ground to a halt. Now, I adore the Dead Kennedys. The group helped to get me through the last couple of years of high school, and helped open my ears to punk rock. And even Jello’s early work outside of the band — the album with D.O.A. is still a favorite — worked well, but since then he has increasingly become an aging punk rock joke. I haven’t enjoyed any of his albums in the last 15 years, and his guest appearances have been increasingly lame (what the fuck was Jello doing on the last Napalm Death record, for God’s sake?) to the point that here, it almost drags down a solid record.

Once you get past the Biafra intrusion, the album loses all of its momentum until the closing track, “Feed the Birds.” In between, there are a couple of mediocre songs, and a couple of short sound experiments that do absolutely nothing except take up space on the CD.

Okay, enough of the negative. If you ignore this 10-minute burst near the end of the album, Scrape the Walls is a great run, right from the opening 52 seconds of “Brown Viking.” The songs mainly stick to fuzzy-guitar drenched rockers, but there are moments that break the mold. “Potential Outlier” lives off a Stooges-like stomp that explodes into a blistering, if tuneful, chorus. “Half Werewolf, Half Vampire” lives off a Black-Sabbath-by-way-of-the-Standells riff, mixed in with some blistering guitar work. And the album closes with the tasty pure rock of “Feed the Birds” (though presented with enough eccentricity and overcharged fuzz to make it live beyond the rock god clichés).

So what to do? If you take off the five weak tracks near the middle of the album you come up with a neat 12-song, 25-minute or so collection. In other words, the perfect length for a classic punk rock album.