Junior Relaxer | ||||
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Studio album by King Cobb Steelie | ||||
Released | August 1997 | |||
Genre | Indie Rock, Jazz Fusion | |||
Label | EMI Canada | |||
Producer | Guy Fixsen | |||
King Cobb Steelie chronology | ||||
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Junior Relaxer is the third album by Canadian alternative rock band King Cobb Steelie, released in 1997. The album's main single, Rational, was the band's biggest hit.
Guest musicians on the album include Kinnie Starr, Nic Gotham, DJ Serious and Don Pyle.
The song Rational refers to Ken Saro-Wiwa, environmental activist and leader of Nigeria' Ogoni people. He led a large and peaceful demonstration against the exploitation of Ogoni land by Nigeria's military dictatorship & multinational oil interests. He was executed by Nigerian authorities on Nov 19 1995.
Mike MacDonald from Much Music had an interview with King Cobb Steelie in which singer songwriter Kevan Byrne stated "when he was actually executed I was quite profoundly moved by this piece of news in a way that I hadn't been, necessarily by all the other, you know, brutally exploitative things that I had read about. For some reason it just made an immediate connection with me and so it became, you know, sort of part of my consciousness in terms of what I was writing about. I mean the Zapatista's are in there too. People don't seem to have latched on to that as much, you know, as Ken Saro Wiwa."
On the album cover design, bassist Kevin Lynn stated "That was a rusty [computer] hard drive that I found in the middle of a field in Guelph, I just happened to be out for a walk. I thought it was a perfect image for what we started messing around a lot with technology, and worrying about, you know, sort of samplers and stuff like that, and it just seemed to be this great image, the rust on the technology."