Put simply, if you like beer, weed and no nonsense rock ‘n’ roll, or any combination of the above, then you’ll love Fu Manchu. The quartet love fast cars, beautiful women, surfing, skateboarding and ’70s chic; they look like four beach bums who’d steal your girlfriend and be your best mate, all casual patterned shirts and laid back attitude.
And it seems their evolution into the definitive stoner band is finally complete. Drawling frontman Scott Hill now sports cropped hair and, at a cursory glance, scarily resembles QOTSA leader Homme. Dynamic drummer Scott Reeder – not the ex-Kyuss bassist of the same name – has replaced erstwhile Kyuss sticksman Brant Bjork, and is resplendent in sleeveless top and tattoos, with a sense of unfussy but determined nonchalance. And while four-stringer Brad Davis is hardly a whirlwind focus of attention, lead guitarist Bob Balch more than makes up for it with some ultra-cool unstoppable grooves.
New album ‘California Crossing’ may have polished some of the rough edges in what could be seen as a push for mainstream acceptance, but live Fu Manchu remain as breeze block heavy as ever.
Indeed the likes of MTV2 would shit their collective pants at the way tonight’s set kicks off, with a shameless opening salvo of white noise exploding into arguably their finest track to date, the fabulously-titled ‘Evil Eye’.
Fu Manchu don’t so much headbang as bodybang; Hill and especially Balch spend most of the set slamming themselves in unison almost double over their see-through guitars in time to sledgehammer riff after riff, drenched with sweat. They give, to use a cliché, 110 per cent and by god do they mean it. This said, the navigation of their stoner spaceship temporarily goes down after fine blasts through the likes of ‘Mongoose’ and ‘California Crossing’ itself – new song ‘Downtown In Dogtown’ is positively cringeworthy, like Motley Crüe had they discovered Black Sabbath instead of make-up, while the usually sludge-tastic ‘Godzilla’ is just plain sluggish.
But all thoughts of a crash-land conclusion are firmly banished with a fearsome closing salvo of ‘Eatin’ Dust’, ‘Shift Kicker’, ‘King of the Road’ (“king of the road says you’re too slow!”) and ‘Squash That Fly’. And if that wasn’t skull-caving enough, they end with ‘Anodizer’, from ‘The Action Is Go’ album, which includes what feels like 10 minutes of feedback-squealing noise that batters satisfyingly back into the song’s main piledriving riff.
True, you could probably sing the chorus of just about any of Fu Manchu’s stoner anthems to the same tune, but even if that is the case, then what a fucking tune it is. An encore, although not strictly necessary, sees old favourite ‘Weird Beard’ wheeled out and comprehensively dusted off in emphatic fashion, but they’ve already done enough. The ball’s in your court Queens of the Stone Age.
