Everybody has to have a hobby. Chris likes to make busts of South Carolina’s governors out of butter. Dave and Rob have their backyard-wrestling tag-team career. Me, when I’m not working on RW or making the reality TV or writing scripts or this thing, I spend my free time making rap songs about my kickball team. Two years ago, inspired by Excalibrah and The Flip Scoldjah (oh wait, I meant my hated rivals Excalibrah and The Flip Scoldjah), I made a small collection of not-very-good songs about my kickball team, The Grassy Best, under the moniker The Grassy Beast. Since then I have been sporadically working on a follow-up, and though the Best folded nearly a year ago, the Beast kept going and finally got together enough tracks for another album. And now we present that album for your amusement.

The very loose concept of the Beast’s work is that Los Angeles (and possibly the world) has been overrun by zombies, and the surviving members of The Grassy Best are now grizzled zombie fighters. Granted, much of the lyrical content of this album concerns Hollywood Division kickball in-jokes, but the other topics covered may be of more interest to you: zombies, Batman, Lost, 90s alt-rock, the comics of Grant Morrison, The Simpsons, eschatology, and hyperbolic braggadocio that makes Kanye West seem humble. On the production side, DJ Two-Handed Engine samples everybody from XTC to Carl Sandburg to Joe “Bean” Esposito, and even brings in a real guitarist for one track.

So click the cover art (by my brother, master carpenter and noted zombie artist Will Linn) to download the album, and perhaps for 51 minutes it will transport you to a world where everything is simple, where a well-timed kick and a big rubber ball can defeat the worst evils in existence. Enjoy?

Track listing:
1. Get Ready (The Sound of the Beast)
2. Fight ‘Em Off
3. Keep Off the Grass
4. In the Swan
5. The Best
6. Mexican Coke
7. Release the Hounds
8. Alec Guinness
9. Black Glove
10. Where Is Your Brain?
11. Let Me Work
12. Five Innings
13. Sixth World Bitches

More at thegrassybeast.com.

–Gardner

UPDATE 10/20: Apparently I’m an idiot who can’t type in a basic URL. The link is now fixed.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 19th, 2009 at 12:02 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.