Mixtape 107 • Dedication
Born Ruffians hail from the Great White North, and they have an innate ability to craft razor-sharp hooks out of the simplest of riffs.
Born Ruffians hail from the Great White North, and they have an innate ability to craft razor-sharp hooks out of the simplest of riffs.
It’s edgy and manic and insistent, and it’ll surely drive your lunatic friends to ask you who is making that racket. Make sure you tell them Clifffs is spelled with three Fs.
The Musée National stood like a squat block, facing the highway at an angle and mirrored to the left by the library. The hu hu sat inside, waiting in the wing housing the musical instrument collection. The surgeon nervously handled the endoscope case, dusty from the helicopter ride that had brought them to N’Djamena. The calligrapher was clearly nervous but their services would only be required for brief minutes while they inspected the inscription on the inside of the ancient calabash.
It was a peaceful suburban street, and they had taken great care to select a vehicle that would not stand out when parked along its sidewalks, a gold Taurus wagon. The very familiar nature of the setting — the shading trees, the mottled but well-kept asphalt, the toys scattered on lawns — made it feel like one of the most exotic places they’d been to in a while. The cartographer checked the coordinates on the fancy device strapped to their wrist, but any web search could have found them Brewster, New York. The ethnomusicologist leaned against the mailbox, labeled “Marie”, and scanned the canopy of the tremendous spreading oak planted square in the middle of the lawn, eyes peeled for that squirrel.
“Did you say you wanted FIVE?” asked the turkey-leg vendor, his incredulity betraying the slightest bit of Norwegian accent. The crowds at the Trondenes Middle Ages Visitor Park thronged past as the young man counted the hands available to the pair before him, performed a simple matching algorithm to the five turkey-legs being requested, and came up with a non-computing value. “We’re hungry,” offered the machinist helpfully. The gymnast kept an eye out for Sverre the allodialist. They needed to have a few words with him about the land titles, preferably in the privacy of the sleek three-man catamaran that had discretely brought them here. The half-darkening of the sky that passed for night at these latitudes meant the usual tactics were out and they would have to convince him to come willingly.
The cryptographer tried to once again estimate the circumference of the lighthouse, asking the question aloud and then naming best guesses. The compulsion to know these geometric factors was strong. The agronomist successfully prevented their eyes from rolling. The history of this place was more interesting, having provided a high point from which to shine a light for centuries, currently for Estonia but briefly for the Kingdom of Torgu. That last bit of trivia was relevant because they were here to meet with the self-appointed Official Court Jester, who had requested they journey to this location on a rented tandem bicycle. They had also requested ice cream, “any color except white.” It waited in a cooler strapped to the bicycle’s ample frame.
Straight up garage-billy from Spain, filled with surf rock, psychedelic, and British Invasion references. The vocals are in Spanish, but the bad bad attitude is unmistakable.