Guys and Dolls: Tsunami - Slugger (7 May 1993)

 

Buy this at Discogs

Two tracks blogged about in a day! What madness is this? Well, they have a couple of things in common, such as:

1) Both Tsunami’s album, Deep End and Scrawl’s mini-album, Bloodsucker were issued by Simple Machines, out of Arlington County, Virginia.

2) Like Vi Ploriontos, Slugger made my list of inclusions - albeit with a question mark next to it - then I was going to pass on it, only to reprieve it.

I don’t think Slugger is as good a track as Vi Ploriontos, but this could be down to it being harder to get a handle on. I think it’s about outsiders trying to break into a clique, but doing a bad job of it, though it’s not easy to decipher that from the vocals. I was helped by the fact that part of the lyrics are included in the liner notes for Deep End:

Fly in to town on a saucer of gold.

You wouldn’t know cool 

If it crept up and slugged you in the nose.

I was probably guilty of giving up too easily, but I initially wrote the track off as being too insubstantial for inclusion. However, when I found myself thinking about Vi Ploriontos, I was convinced that the riff to Slugger was from Vi Ploriontos. The fact that that chugging riff had clamped itself to my brain convinced me to put it back on the metaphorical mixtape. Sometimes, you just have to go with the vibes.

Video courtesy of Brooks Wyrick.

Lyrics copyright of their authors.