On Rags in Skull:

George Brigman Rags in Skull (Bona Fide) It was a happy occasion when local rocker George Brigman's '70s vinyl catalog was finally brought into the digital age last year. However, Bona Fide Records promised even more Brigman--and it has arrived in the form of Rags in Skull, Brigman's first new work in a quarter century, a love of heavy guitar having kept his spirit as well as his fingers young and supple despite the passage of time. He shifts into gear for "Borderline," the album's first rave-up, a tune dipped in the 1969-'70 sound of psychedelia changing into hard rock, with provocative neo-prog guitar and drum-break change-ups. "Somebody put milk in my eggs and someone has got to pay," Brigman sings over descending fuzz on a song of the same title. Reflecting his mood, apparently sour enough to make the devil leave the room, Brigman then lurches into a cymbal-smashing shuffle for "Some of My Best Friends Are Snakes." It's the kind of treatment that retro-loving stoner rockers never nail even though they ought to.

A promotional clip, slated for the web and originating from a local access cable show out of Dundalk in the mid-'80s, shows Brigman and cohorts in dapper denim explaining to the interviewer that Baltimore clubgoers liked a little more homogeneity in their rock than the band served up. Anyone who's endured such interviews for the sake of exposure knows it's always necessary to explain why bookings were scanty without appearing supercilious, a job Brigman handles with aplomb. For Rags in Skull's finish, "Goin' to Pieces" and "Swell," Brigman indulges the guitar hero in everyone, the latter throwing arena-echoed ax squiggles into the sunset, showing he was always fit for that big national stage--our loss, not his.
--George Smith, Baltimore City Paper

As George Brigman rumbles and rolls his way through "Rags in Skull," his first album of all new material in 25 years, the listener has to wonder what the guitarist has been up to for the past couple decades. It sounds like he scheduled his 2006 dates in the recording studio way back in the '80s, then proceeded to lock himself in his dark, dank basement with a pair of perpetually agitated junkyard dogs and didn't break out of the bulwark until he felt he had tortured himself enough to lay down some of the darkest, meanest guitar parts possible.

"Rags in Skull" is the rare album that revels in its heaviness and
isn't afraid to let the riffs run wild. Some time soon after he
picked up a guitar you probably could have said that Brigman played the blues, but what he does now is too loud and destructive; it would send shivers to the old blues legends' hunched-over spines, and it's way too tough to be compared to bland blues fanboys like Clapton. Mississippi Delta demi-god Robert Johnson may have sold his soul to the devil so he could play the guitar, but Brigman, unlike uninspired virtuosos like Stevie Ray Vaughn, knows that just because you lost your soul doesn't mean you can't play with passion---Gregory Connor, Tufts Daily 

I Can Hear the Ants Dancin' CD:

Thirty years later, this music still kicks major fucking ass. George's massive fuzz leads and solos bite and thrash with the intensity of 100 punk bands...completely essential stuff.--Scott Seward, Decibel

 

 

It's great to have some one like George Brigman to show us how low we can still go--David Fricke, Musician 

A few words about Jungle Rot:

This is not only a lost classic, it’s one of the loudest, rawest, and most uncompromisingly great albums of the 70’s. --DK Presents

"Jungle Rot" is special because it exists as not only an absolutely demented record of wide eyed white boy blues but it also acts as one of the missing links between the heavy blues and acid damage of '67-'72 and the major musical revolution that erupted a year after it's release. When you factor in that Brigman was 18 years old when the record was conceived, well it hardly seems possible. --Chris Jacques, Foxy Digitalis

 

 

One of the great homemade masterpieces of the 1970s, George Brigman's JUNGLE ROT is the sound of youthful hero worship gone gleefully off the deep end. Conceived as a tribute to British psych-blues band the Groundhogs and their leader Tony McPhee, the album takes that bands' acid-fried boogie and warps it with primitive recoding techniques and the fevered isolation in which Brigman worked. The title track alone with its fuzz-damaged guitar pan and punishing four-on-the-floor rhythms is worth the price of admission, yet the rest of the album delivers equally inspired wallops of technical brilliance and blown-out acid shred. While Brigman continued to hone his chops in the ensuing decades, he did so once again in relative anonymity. In the mean time, JUNGLE ROT became a collectors' sensation, finally receiving an official reissue in 2005.--Muze