Of course, part of the reason that albums were shorter back in the day was that the more information you put on a disc, the more you included, the more the quality dropped. For me, one of my all-time favourite records as a kid – it was also my first concert – was Hemispheres by Rush, and this record is either a minute or 40 seconds shorter than that. I’d rather hear 10 songs and get to suck them in. “I don’t want to hear 20 songs by my favourite artist. “That, to me, is the folly of CDs,” says Claypool. Given the epic nature of the tale, it’s something of a triumph that in an age where attention spans are lower than ever and yet 70-minute albums are the norm, Primus managed to bring the album to a frothing climax in just over half an hour. Instead I use the notion of the metaphors that are implied in the story.” It could easily be interpreted as some form of parody, and if you look through the lyrics I don’t often mention goblins and very rarely mention rainbows. “The biggest challenge was to write lyrics about goblins and rainbows and it not to come off like a Tenacious D song. At times it was incredibly easy, and at times it was difficult. For me, the images Ul de Rico painted for this thing are so spectacular and so strong I just really wanted to support that as best I could and not detract. We’re not Radiohead, who have a little bigger production budget than we do, but we come up with some pretty cool stuff. The visual element has always been a very strong part of what we do live, given the parameters of what we can afford. It’s always been about visuals and trying to evoke some interesting pictures through music.
“We’ve never been about taking it to the dance floor-type lyrics. “That’s what I’ve always tried to do with Primus stuff,” says Claypool. It’s like a nursery rhyme set to some form of alien, disjointed jazz, but it somehow succeeds in breathing life into Ul de Rico’s deviant story. From the stumbling lurch of The Valley, with its spookily disembodied vocals that sound as if they were recorded underwater, via the stuttering The Seven – a song with a cadence that makes it feel like a demented, foreboding sequel to John Walter Bratton’s Teddy Bear’s Picnic – to the off-kilter, racing drama of the climactic The Storm, it’s an album full of squirting rhythms, lolloping basslines and enormous mischief. From the ominous spoken-word introduction – read by Tool bass player Justin Chancellor (“the champion goblin,” says Claypool) – to the story’s startling denouement, it’s an album that conjures up images of peculiar lands, epic journeys and dark, sinister activity with some considerable degree of skill. Thinly veiled political sentiments aside, the album manages to capture the book’s prismatic yet black-hearted vibrance perfectly.
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