Warning: rock critics ahead. English morphs into a foreign language when strained through the sensibilities of the modern rock critic, a harrowing hybrid of too-hip-for-the-room hieroglyphics and faux-impressive gibberish, best characterized as HipGiblish.
This being your standard-issue, transparently promotional, rock-band's-in-town story—guitarist Jeff Raines of funk-blues-rock jam band Galactic, set for a House of Blues gig—we provide the interview, while critics spew profundity. As a reader service, we've attempted to translate HipGiblish back into English, with assistance from Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. We're confident it will elucidate the verbiage.
Jeff Raines: "We got more press with Ruckus than we ever had before. Larger publications paid attention to us."
Details magazine: "Instead of co-opting greasy-spoon soul, the boys update the N'Awlins vibe in a finger-licking gauntlet of futuristic jazz/funk."
Translation: Rather than take over the spiritual essence of an inexpensive dining establishment with oily-textured eating implements, Galactic provides current information on the New Orleans emotional atmosphere in a long line of American music characterized by propulsive, syncopated rhythms/combined traditional forms of black music from a time yet to come that can be flicked with the tongue off the digits of one's forelimb.
Raines: "We have our own studio now, so we took more time to flesh the songs out [on the album Ruckus]. We could walk away from a song for a week and come back to it with fresh ears. On previous albums, we'd been rushed by whatever studio time we had. Plus, we were working with ProTools [recording computer system], which opens up possibilities."
Entertainment Weekly: "Galactic's neo-swamp grooves [are] coated with a frosty, trip-hop sheen."
Translation: Galactic's revival of the long, narrow depressions of a spongy morass are spread with a finishing layer featuring a briskly cold, stumbling subculture of inner-city youths with a subdued glitter approaching, but short of optical reflection.
Raines: "It's funny. We had to have rehearsals before the tour to learn how to play a lot of the stuff that was done with overdubbing and computers. If there was a three-guitar overdub on a song, the keyboard player would fill in some of the section, or the harmonica or horn player."
Robin A. Rothman, NewMusic Monthly: "[It] comes off as Spaghetti Western booty music."
Translation: It results in what appears to be a tuneful accompaniment to Clint Eastwood getting a piece of prairie ass, directed by Sergio Leone, in A Fistful of Condoms.
Raines: "We don't look for crowd response as much as the guys in the band going, 'Whoa, I never heard that before!' That's how we gauge how things are going. It's like a dialogue among the band. You have to keep saying new and interesting things or the conversation gets boring."
Ramp: "Swampy interstellar blues. Genre: Space-Funk."
Translation: Melancholy music of lamentation characterized by 12-bar phrases in a spongy, morass-like texture among the stars of the Milky Way galaxy. Category of artistic composition: combined traditional forms of black music beyond the earth's atmosphere.
Raines: "If you're on the edge, you're doing your fans a great service, whether or not they like everything that occurs. To keep them paying attention is a very important part of being a band on the road for years."
Clayton Trapp, FM Sound: "Jeff Raines emerges flying high astride a Pterodactyl riff."
Translation: Jeff Raines comes into being while moving into the air, legs on each side of an ostinato phrase supporting the solo improvisation of an extinct winged reptile of the late Jurassic and Cretaceous eras. Who's really hip.
Raines: "I think we're a funk band deep in our hearts."
DeMatt Harkins, An Honest Tune: "Once this pattern of [aggression] seems detectable, it turns itself on its nose with schizophrenia."
Translation: As soon as the model proposed for imitation of forceful action is determined to actually exist, it causes itself to move around on its vertebrate olfactory organ with a psychotic disorder characterized by loss of contact with the environment, noticeable deterioration in the level of functioning in everyday life, and disintegration of personality expressed as disorder of feeling, thought and conduct.
Our advice: Go see Galactic. They play good.