Content area
Richard Cheese & Lounge Against The Machine "The Best of Richard Cheese" www.iloverichardcheese.com For most people, Bill Murray's deathless SNL skit as a smarmy lounge singer over-emoting on "The Star Wars Theme" was more than sufficient to send that niche on its way; for the rest of us dead-horse floggers, there's Richard Cheese.
Richard Cheese & Lounge Against The Machine
"The Best of Richard Cheese"
www.iloverichardcheese.com
For most people, Bill Murray's deathless SNL skit as a smarmy lounge singer over-emoting on "The Star Wars Theme" was more than sufficient to send that niche on its way; for the rest of us dead-horse floggers, there's Richard Cheese.
As the purely diabolical alter-ego of writer, actor, comedian and singer Mark Jonathan Davis, Richard Cheese "elevates" the notion of the lounge-ification of rap, punk, classic rock, hip-hop and metal hits by following through far beyond the obvious surface joke.
The devil is in the details, and they're all attended to here with excruciating chutzpah.
Cheese effortlessly channels the likes of Sammy Davis Jr., Bob Goulet, Jack Jones and Steve Lawrence, complete with faux-hipster asides, willfully-flatted notes held far too long, and the clueless over-selling of even the most vapid lyric.
The language is often as crude as a sore-toed sailor, but Cheese is just singing them the way they were written.
His six-piece band is delightfully over-qualified, perfectly realizing the utterly twisted arrangements that (for example) dress U2's "Sunday Bloody Sunday" as a horn-heavy, south-of-the-border vamp, Korn's "Nookie" as a WWII-era jump blues, and Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall" as a slinky/stinky bossa nova.
Rarely has bad taste been this much fun.
- Jim Musser
Copyright 2006 - Press-Citizen Iowa City, IA - All Rights Reverved