Rabid In The Kennel Artists
Mitch Easter
In 2007, noted producer, musician and songwriter Mitch Easter turned loose his first album since Every Dog Has His Day, the final release by his band Let’s Active. Dynamico was not only the North Carolina native’s first album in nearly two decades, but it’s also the first to be credited to his own name. In other words, it is Easter’s first true solo project.
Dynamico exhibits the gale-storm intensity of a man making up for lost time, and it features some of the strongest songs of Easter’s career, including more blatantly socio-political material than he’s ever assembled in one place.
While Easter hasn’t lobbed anything in the marketplace for quite awhile, he never stopped writing and recording new material. Dynamico skims the cream from the top of Easter’s bulging tape archive. In an age where CDs are often front-loaded with a few good tracks and a great deal of filler—or “two hits and ten pieces of junk,” as Phil Spector once put it—Easter’s CD is rock-solid and startlingly inventive from start to finish.
From the instant excitement of “1 ½ Way Street,” with its throbbing power chords, to the rococo pop-psychedelia of “Love Slaves of Paradise Lost,” Dynamico doesn’t let up in lyrical cunning and musical intensity. One of Easter’s drollest offerings, “Sudden Crown Drop,” likens a disease afflicting palm trees—whose tops fall unexpectedly to the ground, often crushing fancy cars in rich folks’ locales like Beverly Hills and Palm Beach—to the deteriorating state of the world on many fronts. Behind the wit, he’s deadly serious, and the pulsing, dyspeptic music illustrates his concern.
Musically, the album is one mind-opening kaleidoscopic turn after another, fusing disparate things like Buffalo Springfield-ish acoustic solos with AC/DC‘s whomping big beat. Liberated from having to write for a commercial market that doesn’t even exist anymore, relieved of having to make accommodations to other band members, and feeling no particular deadline pressure, Easter was totally driven by inspiration as he worked on his own material between all the production work he did. In the summer of 2006, Easter suddenly realized he had an enormous backlog of great songs and that it was time to get them out there. Thus, he began picking and mixing Dynamico‘s fourteen songs.
He played almost every part, including drums, which he took up in high school. Of course, Easter shines throughout on guitar—particularly on the ripping space-age love song “Time Warping” and the distorted, funhouse-mirror neopsychedelia of “The Phantoms of Ephemera.”
Easter is, as he puts it, “trying to fly the banner for more ‘instinctive’ records, as opposed to something made to fit a commercial or stylistic notion.” He succeeded brilliantly on Dynamico.
