San Francisco native Tommy Guerrero has returned from skateboarding and relative obscurity with this year's offering of Junk Collector. Guerrero, who became a poster child for Powell Peralta in 1985 when he began his professional skateboarding career, eventually became a member of the Bones Brigade - a sort of a mid to late '80s skateboarding dream team - and was cast in vintage skate films such as "The Search for Animal Chin."
Alongside Guerrero's supreme skating savvy was his interest in music, mostly punk. Guerrero, 34, has more than 20 years of experience playing guitar and bass and, at one time or another, has appeared on the same bill with bands such as DOA and Bad Brains.
Guerrero's history can easily be heard in Junk Collector, yet the album does not take the stance of a genre exposÇ or a cultural declaration. The album ranges from gross rhythmic repetition in cuts such as "Organism" to the flux and flow weave of tempos and rhythms in "Birds Over Head."
Guerrero uses a lot of different samples, creating textures from the impotent and barren, to the florid and fertile. This gives him a lot of space melodically, which interestingly enough, he decides to use only periodically. For instance, the cut "Terra Unifirma" begins with a processed recording of a flock of birds - enter stock hip-hop beat - proceeds to an evolving cycle of textural melodicism, all the while evoking Guerrero's fairly original blues and punk sensibilities and ends with a dissonant forecast of things to come.
In contrast, "Rusty Gears Lonely Years," is so simple in theme and execution that one feels that one might have fallen through some strange portal into the trip-hop equivalent of ABC's TGIF television programs in the early '90s.
To be certain none of Guerrero's songs are virtuoso performances in almost any respect. This is not the music that will cause one to scream the infinite into the dark corners of all that is known, nor will it reach within your body and make every cell cry for the sustenance of true love. But Guerrero's music will also not, thankfully, summon the same emotions of "Oops, I Did it Again!" The music is extremely stable and repetitive, but it doesn't detract from the strength of the album. I get the feeling that Guerrero could use the same beat for a million different songs and still come up with tunes I would be glad to listen to. On the album, Guerrero consistently proves his music as intelligent and adaptable while being extremely coherent and understandable at the same time. A truly interesting combination indeed.
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So, if you feel like sippin' a margarita and riding off into the sunset in your 21st century cyber-castle or just surfin' a few perfect sine waves that don't require a trip to Africa to enjoy, check Guerrero out - he may just have what your looking for. But, if you're still trying to motivate yourself to take the world over, leave it to Wagner.
