I-94 Bar review (Australia)

3 out of 5 bottles from Australia's I-94 bar. The Lou Reed comparison is cute.

I like the way it kicks off – guitar riff, bass & drums kick in, then vox “I’m ready to testify, I feel it down in my soul.” Hey, neat! “Cos I been smoking angel dust, And now I’m outa control.” Oh dear.

Fucking hell, even I feel a bit embarassed for these guys. And I once wrote a column titled ‘I Love Drugs’ The album actually has a bass solo, just to prove that too much drugs really can fuck you up.

Musically it aint too bad. Fairly straight forward punkrock kinda stuff, but played tight & hard and with enough musical imagination to keep your attention. They’ve got a neat rhythmic groove happening, too, sitting here at a puta, it’s kinda toe tapping and if you were to catch ‘em at a gig, you might dance, espcially if you were halfway thru a bottle of vodka and had just smoked your third joint to take the edge of that line of speed.

And then I hear a line like “We’re puking on the stage and we’re ready to deal.” The vocals are sang in a particularly clear voice, and mixed high and mostly dry in the mix. You can’t miss understanding every last word. There’s no wit or humour about any of it, it’s just this relentless barrage of the often mundane realities of devoting a life to getting wasted. Woody High tends to sing in your face, as it were. It’s kinda like the drug-fucked punk equivalent of gangsta rap.

And then you get a song like "Breaking Shit", another humourless ode, this time to destroying David Bowie records and it occurred to me – maybe ‘Mighty High’ are an FBI or ATF plant? The sound of all those breaking bottles at the end of that track are gonna scare the kids off a drug-fuelled lifestyle, lest they end up writing lyrics like these. Fuck, it’s working for me already.

Lou Reed never had to write “Drug city, here I come, let me in right now.” No, he wrote "Heroin" a love song to the drug, but like all the best love songs, full of ambiguity and mixed feelings. And a work of fucking art. - Earl O'Neill

http://www.i94bar.com/reviews/mightyhigh.html

Thursday 7/24/08 @ Trash, Brooklyn

With Thinning The Herd, Planeside, Backwoods Payback and Viking Skull. Another show where people got REALLY messed up. It was great! Gavin from Thinning has a lot of mutual friends with us so it was cool to finally meet up with him.

Backwoods are friends with Mess With The Bull and are a great band and awesome people. Hopefully we'll be playing with them again soon. This was also the first show ever in America of Viking Skull. Jess Margera from CKY is their new drummer. This was definitely the loudest show ever at the Trash Bar. Owen from the Everyothers did a great job behind the board. Walt and Joey from the Bullys were there, too. Maximum stone gett-off was achieved.

Set list: Hands Up; Albert Hofmann; Shooting Spree; I Live To Get High; Stone Gett-Off; The Ram; Breakin Shit; Mooche; Dusted; Hooked On Drugs

Lucid Culture review

Try listening to this cd without cracking a smile. You can’t. It’s impossible. The best parody bands know their source material inside out, which is apparent right off the bat with these completely over-the-top, Spinal Tap style Brooklyn metalheads. In the case of Mighty High, it’s the MC5 and early 70s “hard rock” – what heavy metal was called before the term was appropriated from a French comic book series - that they rip off. Production aside, the sound is pure 1971, your basic, by-the-numbers riff-rock with all the right flourishes: loud, simplistically flashy, absolutely meaningless bluesy guitar solos, scales, feedback, bass doubling the guitar line, hoarse Bon Scott-style vocals and a fixation with drugs. A lot of this is laugh-out-loud hilarious, especially the way the album ends. Some sample song titles and lyrics:

Dusted: “Living for a high to make me die, I’m getting dusted…”

Hooked on Drugs: “You never believed it could be so bad, living at home with mom and dad…I feel good, and I’m hooked on drugs. YEAAAAAH!!!!” Yes, there is a brief break for cowbell at the end of the song.

Escape from Daytop: “We’re puking on the stage and we’re ready to kill.”

The title track: “Quit your job and start your day off high.”

Drug City: “Bring the prices down, you gotta set it free, we’ll turn the whole world into Drug City.”

The jokes aren’t limited to lyrics. The various guitar solos on Buy a Pound range from the sublimely awful to the ridiculous, particularly when the song goes doublespeed. Albert Hofmann, a homage to the man who first synthesized LSD, pillages the Blue Oyster Cult classic Dominance & Submission. Is this to suggest that Swiss scientist was a Nazi? Shooting Spree, a tribute to a sniper in a tower, features a break with cops on a bullhorn. The one-liners are so good it wouldn’t be fair to give them away. I Live to Get High edges into the 80s with a solo lifted straight from Iron Maiden, but it’s great all the same. The cd closes with T.S. Eliot, a rap-metal number: “You don’t like it. So what. We do!” Fans of Tenacious D, Rawles Balls, Satanicide and, yeah, Spinal Tap will love this album. Or spin this for just about any fun person you know who has a sense of humor and a taste for loud music (and intoxicants – it’s probably best appreciated in combination with several at once). Mighty High plays Trash Bar at 10 on July 24.

Stone Gett-Off shirt now available

You know you want one. $15 postpaid in the USA, $20 postpaid in the rest of the world via paypal.com (send funds to mightyhighrocks@yahoo.com). Throw an extra $5 on and we'll send you a CD with the shirt!