Right up front, this is a really terrible album. Fun House is played and recorded with all the talent and quality you'd expect from your favorite high school garage band. The Stooges play dirty hard blues rock with minimalist lyrics and lazy vocal styling, almost like a punk band but without any of the raw anger. What I could understand of the lyrics were cliched sexual trash but after a while I tuned them out, so I guess that might not be true of every song.
There's nothing on Fun House that wasn't already done in the decade prior by numerous bands that were far more interesting and talented. As far as I can tell there is a guitarist, a bass player, and a drummer. One of them could also be the singer, I don't know. The song "1970" expands the proceedings by including a closing saxophone solo... that lasts almost two minutes, and eventually delves into the saxophonist just making noise, not really playing.
The title track is seven minutes of, "Ba dah ba dah ba dat dat... dat dat." I can't even remember if there were lyrics other than the occasional, "Take it down..." from the lead singer. Actually that's the only thing I remember him saying across the whole album. I don't even know why singers do that. I get it... they want the band to play quieter, but it's such a cliched thing to do. In a studio setting, shouldn't the rest of the band just know when they're supposed to get quieter?
The closing track "LA Blues" is an avant garde piece of junk with lots of screaming, saxophone tootling, and heavily distorted guitar. There's also two drum tracks playing over each other. I know blues music can be really derivitive, and Los Angeles to many people is a hellhole, but there's no need to insult both the genre and the city by combining their names and producing worthless noise.
Basically Fun House amounts to a whole lot of nothing. The only real selling point is it's a short album, but I still wanted it to end much sooner. 1 star.
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