Fizzlepop-Tin Cans, I Can, +I WILL/The Blade

I started Fizzlepop when I was about 15 as a means of pushing all my ego into one project so I could be more productive with other people. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. An obvious victim of so-called "middle child syndrome," I sat with my hand held tape recorder and recorded weird shit, sometimes racket, sometimes perverted folk songs. I wrote about school. I wrote about germs. I wrote about aliens. I wrote about cryptids. I wrote about all the sex I wasn't having. I wrote about my Catholic guilt. You know, basic Aquarius shit. By the time I became 17, I upgraded to a four-track, so that my bullshittery could be all the more prominent.

Originally intending to sound like Primus (Fizzle Fry/Anti-Pop maybe? I don't remember; I've been trying to figure it out for years), my tasteless attempts at wit and humor and the acoustic guitar stood in my way. Fizzlepop evolved into something that my audience would laugh at/with, albeit nervously. Some people are a little disgusted by liposuction, as I discovered when a man at a local bar and grill abandoned his jägerschnitzel and walked out in the middle of The Blade, which is about liposuction. I also listened to a lot of Cannibal Corpse at the time, so I was a bit into the whole shock value deal. You've been warned.

As these songs were written from ages 15-17, some of it has, over time, proven to be somewhat embarrassing. I can't exactly remember what I was thinking when I wrote some of these, so it is difficult to tell when I'm being satirical, totally facetious, or completely melodramatic. I remember that Spank the Monkey was written before I knew the meaning of the euphemism and was just me being silly/16. (For some reason people love that stupid fucking song.) Tin Cans, complete with Thurston Moore sample from Sonic Death, is about my distain for ham. Stone Sour Face is about my disappointment with a hateful student teacher. Sicko is about my belief that math was invented to torture me.  

Damnation Blues was written with a comedian friend of mine, Michael Krychiw. We wanted to write a blues song, so we thought of the most depressing thing we could think of: damnation. So we came up with a guy that does hideous, terrible shit, and he gets a well deserved punishment. Racecar AM was the first song I ever put on the computer, taken from my very first cassette I ever recorded on, and jumbled up with a bunch of radio static and reversed. The reversed vocals inadvertently say, "I'm backward!" at the end. Listen for it, it's pretty cool.

So there it is. This stuff was written before my first two EPs. I never released it because I wanted the songs to be just to my liking, but never got around to finishing them. I've had this long list of albums I've been wanting to release for years, track order, art, everything, but it takes me almost as long as Kevin Shields, and the results aren't nearly as rewarding. Besides, I have tons of new shit that I'm more concerned with presently. But to be fair, I do like *most* of these songs and am rather proud of them. I had the help of some friends and they're listed below.

So, much to my embarrassment, seven years in the making, a testament to my angst, my virginity, my bad sense of humor, and my constant need to be the center of attention:

Tin Cans, I Can, +I WILL/The Blade

Brandon Gregory- drums on track 1
John Riley- bass on track 4
Randy Hall- drums on track 4
Nick Riley- everything else
Track 7 co-written with Michael Krychiw
All songs written between 2005 and 2007 and recorded between 2005 and 2011.