Giant Princess, Giant Princess

First of all, there’s really no need to read this review. Giant Princess isn’t even selling this album; they’re giving it away for free. You can download the whole thing with no jumping through hoops at the three links at the bottom of the review. Whether what I say about the recording entices you or repulses you, there is no excuse for not trying something freely given.

That being said, you might as well hear my thoughts while you wait for it to download. Giant Princess’s self-titled debut recording is an exercise in all the wonderful things you can do with a bad recording of good songs, and I do mean a bad recording. The mix is a “mix” only in the loosest sense of the word, with the vocals all but unintelligible and the organ so far up front you might as well be sitting next to it. That’s the total genius of the album. Just like the Pixies forced you to see through the haze of noise into the weird minds of Frank Black and Kim Deal, so are we pulled into the awesomely loose song style that makes up Giant Princess. When you pull the blues up to the red line and speed it up, this is what you get. It’s an unstoppable journey of energy and insanity that makes me proud that we’re both from Houston.

I do wish that some sort of lyric sheet was provided with the recording, because I have no idea what Collin Hedrick is saying. I can only assume that with titles like “zip zop wow” and “lifetime sexbrain” that it’s either surrealistically genius or complete irrelevant. In fact, the complete lack of any information on how or why these songs exist only serves to further the belief that the album is being beamed in from some wonderful dimension where music didn’t fall into decline.

More and more, I am becoming convinced that the world is actively hiding awesome music from the populace. Like slavemasters outlawing the teaching of reading and writing to slaves, the miasmic music industry is struggling at hundreds of thousands of kilowatts to convince us that 3 Doors Down and their ilk has anything at all relevant to say. Meanwhile, artists like Giant Princess have to scream themselves hoarse just to whisper the true evolution of rock and roll. They have to give away an album that twenty years ago you would have paid through the nose to own a special vinyl edition of.

Rough, amateur, and loud, I guarantee that Giant Princess is just what you need.