Written by: Dave Cantrell

If you wanna talk breakdown in terms of musical fundamentals you could do a whole helluva lot worse than choosing as your subject the Butthole Surfers, be it in their original or any of their incarnations where the primal met the cerebral in a street-level brawl carried out onstage night after night, a pas de deux of the brutal and the beautiful, a carnal carnival of the savage and sublime from which countless college dissertations could be derived (and good luck tackling that ChatGPT) and yet all such attempts would almost certainly end in madness, even (or especially) as it applies to the band’s wide-ranging diaspora.

Because to be clear, we’re not just talking the BS themselves and all the careening iterations the band madly cobbled together through their mythic travels but, more to our purpose here, the where and how their various members dispersed once the Surfers turned from living spectacle to historic annals of legend and legacy even as in some fashion they persevere. As would be expected, those various members in their solo outings have often hewed, in one form or another, toward the unexpected, a conclusion already well represented by SEM’s coverage of forever Surfers’ guitarist Paul Leary and now seconded by the arrival of the band’s bass emeritus JD Pinkus, who with good pal Mike Savino from Tall Tall Trees (and fresh from his transcendent work with Kishi Bashi), has produced a ‘banjo album’ (Ponder Machine, June 30th on Shimmy-Disc) that should redefine all so-called banjo albums from here on out.

Which leads us to this exclusively-presented lead single and video, the resemblance in title and style to “Foggy Mountain Breakdown” being of course no accident but in its oddness serves as a statement of purpose, that purpose being one that’s meant to draw you in to exactly that comparison before pulling you wildly off-key if for, yes, only for a moment but it’s a moment that will stay with you for a good forever. Think that scene from Deliverance gone to delirious seed, think Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs having a moonshine flashback that’s this close to a couple of seconds of a down yonder back porch LSD trip. Think a subtle banjo freakout in excelsis because, truly, this is nothing less.

It is also, in simpler words, an almost nonchalant virtuoso performance gone juuust enough around the bend to keep you not just on your ever-intrigued toes but to lure you ever further toward that wonderfully weird Americana folk side where warmth of character is met with a glancing perversity of intent. If you are at all into this country’s more outré country reflexes, there has seldom been a more tangible, potent example than what’s presented here. If ever we go to another county fair, we hope like hell that something of this plangent, inescapable beauty is featured somewhere between the Tilt-O-Wheel and the psychedelic cotton candy stand.

“Come take a rare peek at life up on Fungal Mountain,” says JD, “where music can literally take you away” and we here at SEM are wholly set to believe it. The proof, as they say, is in the banjo-flavored pudding. Fabulous, devotional, and gently outlandish enough to honor both artists involved, the lovingly sepia-toned video, conceived and shot by Pinkus himself and done so well we can now add ‘rural auteur’ to his portfolio, serves not just the song but as the perfect invitation to one of those halcyon summers we always yearn for, hazy, gently eternal, with a breeze blowing in from the south. [get your banjo on in all the formats here]