REVIEW: Zach Tabori – ‘Attack Of The Clout Chasers’

With his latest LP ‘Attack of the Clout Chasers’, Zach Tabori lights the fuse and walks away as the explosion swirls into an avant-prog fever dream. This is a maximalist theatre of the absurd, dissecting the crumbling attention economy, the cult of online personas, and the ghosts of imperial power with razor wit and fearless musicianship.

If you’ve followed Tabori’s chameleonic path, from pop collaborations with Jaden Smith to his current gig in Dweezil Zappa’s band, you’ll know he’s no stranger to genre collision. But his latest outing could become his most anarchic release to date. Think: King Crimson gatecrashing a Philosophy 101 class and refusing to leave.

Opening with a deceptively intimate acoustic piece in the form of ‘Rotten Pt.2’, the record tricks you into thinking you’re in for a contemplative ride. Then comes ‘Nann Ray’, and the floor drops out. You’re plunged into a nuclear fantasia where distorted horns, twitchy rhythms, and sci-fi dread collide. The album only deepens its commitment to chaos from there, lurching between satirical tirades, warped funk breakdowns, and instrumental flexes that jab at the self-seriousness of “technical” music with glee.

Tabori’s writing operates somewhere between graphic novel surrealism and socio-political critique. ‘JFK’ dissects the whitewashed myths of American legacy with biting detail, while ‘NYC’ feels like a fever-dream postcard from the capital of curated personalities. The album’s pinnacle, ‘Vanité Ou La Mort,” is an unholy alliance of chamber strings, rock bombast, and existential panic featuring a blistering guitar solo from Dweezil Zappa.

The cast here is stacked: from jazz vocalist Sharada Shashidhar to St. Vincent collaborator Rachel Eckroth, from orchestral string arrangements by Suzie Katayama to a drum corps of veterans with credits ranging from Still Woozy to Stanley Clarke. But Tabori remains the architect, bending an arsenal of sounds into something coherent yet completely unpredictable.

In the hands of a lesser artist, this kind of sprawl would fall apart. But Tabori stitches the pandemonium together with a clear thesis: our culture is collapsing under the weight of its own vanity, and the only way to survive is to dance in the debris, or burn the stage entirely.