Dr. Siegel's Fried Egg Shooting Machine

The trio’s debut LP, entitled Dr SEIGEL’S FRIED EGG SHOOTING MACHINE, opened with a swirling psychedelically-styled title track of the Banana Splits/Lemon Pipers ‘Snoopy Meets The Red Baron’ variety at least five years behind the time, thereafter running randomly and shamelessly from one pop rock clichй to another pop rock clichй like the Three Bears on a porridge tasting mission. One minute it was Michel Le Grande, next, Frank Zappa’s ‘Brown Shoes Don’t Make It’-period put in an appearance (no shit!), thereafter it was low-grade paraffin fuelled hard rock interspersed with lowbrow AOR balladry. And those ballads, oh, those fucking ballads… Had Japan been granted entry to the Eurovision Song Contest, Hiro Tsunada’s disastrous cheese-o-thons ‘Someday’ and ‘I Love You’ would have surely both been easy winners, while ‘Plastic Fantasy’ is yet another swirling sickening sub-Picketywitch sugarfest. The kindest we could be towards Flied Egg would be to call them ‘accessible’, for, beyond the AOR balladry and catastrophic yawn-o-thon psych moves, there’s certainly a little something even for the most tetchy hard rocker when the three finally down some caffeine and fire up ‘Guide Me To The Quietness’, a Vanilla Sludge rock ballad performed with all of Flied Egg’s best sub-sub-sub Mountain-meets-Cream ‘Theme From An Imaginary Western’-styled bombast. — Julian Cope.