Ill Fits lead singer, the ever-erratic Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson, sings, at some point on this session, "Fuck you, I'm never coming down." It's a challenge. It comes out as a blurt, as a bark and it's meant to imply - we think - that he's high and there ain't nothing that's going to make him change his ways. It's where he likes and needs to be and aside from the legality of it, there's nothing wrong with it. He's found something that works for him. Who could really have a problem with the way that anyone wants to pass their time if it's just mellowing them out or placing them in a mental crow's nest, high above the ruckus and the riff-raff. It's one way to get out of the gutter and the clutter, at least partially.
The thought takes us to a good jumping off point when considering the music of his latest incarnation, with his cadre of New York buddies, from other bands around town. It's a group that makes sounds that are seriously hot on rhythms and ass-thumping grooves. It's music that implores you to get into a certain mood, very suddenly. It's a mood that basks in the smoke and in a citrus-y, umbrella propped out of the side of your drink glow. It's pulls you halfway out of the fogginess that you've put yourself in and slaps you around a bit, with some of the lessons learned from the Talking Heads of way back when, while going the route of some whacked out spiritual journey that you might never make heads nor tails of. It's simply a way of getting further lost in the tumult and taking the kinds of punches that don't hurt you, but just wake you up enough to know that you're in something of a fight.
Ill Fits music is such that it makes us consider for a second that we might be on vacation, off the clock, but then there's a feeling of mild agitation, an irritation that keeps scratching us in the same spot, so much that we have to acknowledge it. We have to rub the arm that the nails have been working fastidiously. We realize soon enough that we're not on vacation. We dreamt it all and it's never going to come back to us. We've got here some ribbons of what it must have been like - fictitiously - and some weed to reproduce the effect so we can live in the sunshine-y hologram.