This might very well be the most invigorating album you're going to encounter here near the end of 2019. First Fits, the debut release from Fitted, out on Friday via ORG Music, is the kind of thing that reminds a listener just how wonderful the results can be when talents from opposite ends of the post-punk spectrum come together to cause trouble and make a racket.
Fitted is Mike Watt (Minutemen), Graham Lewis and Matthew Sims of Wire, and Bob Lee of The Freeks. The band whips up a squall on this record, with numbers like "The Chunk That Got Chewed", a skittering, fusion-influenced bit of post-rock, getting lodged in the brain on first listen. The wonderfully-titled "Training Pit Bulls for the Navy" is similar, metallic guitar-shrieks fighting for a listener's attention with hits on the kit that sound like sporadic machine-gun fire, while "Magically Blessed" takes that kind of thing and stretches it out and caresses it. The playing here is instinctive, and yet each musician on this record has a moment or two, or many, where they let themselves unleash their full power.
Still, for all the force on First Fits, the epic "Plug in the Jug" is spacious and space-y, the most expansive thing here, even as "The Legend of Lydmar Lucia" suggests another sort of territory that this group could explore. The spoken word cut has passages of music that recall both Can and Ubu, but it also sounds a very tiny bit like certain Minutemen numbers, even as the roiling guitars suggest debts owed to Wire, naturally. Watt, Lewis, Sims, and Lee work tremendously well together, and I loved every corrosive bit of First Fits This is, frankly, exactly how a super-group should behave, alternating between total instrumental chaos and stretches of precise musicality.
First Fits is out on Friday via ORG Music.
More details via Mike Watt's official website, or his official Facebook page.
[Photo: Mike Watt's Facebook page]