Black Kali Ma: You Ride The Pony I'll Be The Bunny : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Hard-rock comebacks are as common as mud, but it's rare for a graying firebrand to improve upon youth's pink chaos. Singer Gary Floyd introduced a bluesy Texas wail to hardcore punk in the early Eighties via the Dicks, then helped father pre-Nirvana alternative rock in San Francisco's Sister Double Happiness. His latest band, Black Kali Ma, betters those underground achievements while answering a higher calling -- shit-kicking rock like Daddy used to make, but with a clear-minded twist sure to put a smile on Ma. She'd particularly enjoy "Kali," a good-ol'-boy tribute to matriarchy that, like the rest of the album, is equal parts hilarious, humanistic and hell-raising. While leering at the local hoods who populate "Angel Face," "Shakin' the Nun" and "Remain Awesome," Floyd and friends generate testosterone-overload anthems that simultaneously worship and demystify coarse masculinity in a shotgun wedding of Lynyrd Skynyrd and Tennessee Williams. These knowing elders address what it really means to take it like a man. (RS 836)

BARRY WALTERS