Primus and The Chocolate Factory

In an attempt to change things up I am going to begin to deliberately vary the length of my articles, this is going to be an example of a shorter piece and there shall be longer ones down the road.  I assume no one shall have any complaints about this.

Some ideas are just so incredibly insane that you couldn’t make them up.  Primus covering the soundtrack of 1971’s Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory, is one of them.  You would have had to have taken a lot of drugs to stumble on that idea before it came about and yet here it is, Les Claypool and gangs interpretation of classic movie fare like “Candy Man” and yes all those oompa loompa bits too.

Despite the madness that this idea initially seems to suggest, the more you think about it, the more this begins to make sense.  Primus and Les Claypool himself, have never been ones for keeping things normal and if there is one thing that Gene Wilder’s performance of Willy Wonka is definitely not, it is normal.  It’s a marriage made in the depths of some surreal world where up is down and right is left and yet somehow it just works, in fact at times it might be brilliant.

In Primus’s hands tracks like “Candy Man” become downright terrifying, with Claypool’s vocals sounding as far away from something that should be played on a children’s movie as you can get.  While “Pure Imagination”, possibly the most famous song from the movie, sounds like something meant to soundtrack a twisted horror movies with its slow build up and light-hearted yet always slightly ominous sound.

Primus & The Chocolate Factory is an album you have to hear for yourself.  It’s twisted, scary but yet somehow brilliant.  It takes a soundtrack that most know and bends it until it is almost unrecognisable, but yet still retains that air of originality that makes it as iconic as it is.  If nothing else, I can guarantee that after one listen to this album, you are unlikely to ever forget it.