MENTORS - Up The Dose

Old School !! Released December 1986 (Death Records)

Donning black hoods long before Midnight hit the scene, Seattle, Washington's irrepressible/irresponsible Mentors made their greasy stain mark on an unsuspecting public. Lead by the the lascivious El Duce, the band built a reputation as the most drunken, disheveled band in extreme music who majored in lyrical shock tactics. Unquestionably, 1986's Up The Dose! contains the band's finest music, the engineering of Bill Metoyer and executive production of Brian Slagel adding an aura of credibility, while manipulating the band's best performance and sound on record.

Musically, this can best be described as, garagey metal/punk, anthemic stompers sent spiraling into the stratosphere by some Greg Kin-esque soaring lead guitar work by Sickie Wifebeater. Foot stomping, yet unkempt, many of the tracks here will stick in your brain forever once you've heard them.

Lyrically, it's also some of the band's best work, laugh-out-loud lines littered throughout the album. This was a time when fans were expected to be able to differentiate between outright misogyny and comedy ... not like these PC times. Hence, those in the know knew to laugh and revel in the sheer bombast of it all for such tracks as: 'Adultery' ("I'm looking for a chick that wears a ring, Cause one night stands are my thing, Your marriage means nothing to me, I'm totally into adultery.'), 'Heterosexuals Have The Right To Rock' ("Ya know that their weiner looks like a noodle, They prance around like a french poodle, They hang around in cliques for kicks, But we all know that they're chicks with dicks.") and 'SFCC' ("Wash my socks scrub my ass, Draw me a bath bitch, Then you cook me a feast, Yeah.") And that's the tame stuff!

So, yeah, if you attack this release in the right frame of mind (ie. don't take things so damn seriously!), you'll find yourself singing along and laughing at the sheer over-the-top machismo of it all.

Note: R.I.P. El Duce - killed (murdered?) after being run over by a freight train in 1997, purportedly while drunk, mere days after being interviewed for the Kurt and Courtney documentary where he claimed Love offered him $50k to kill Cobain.

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