The satirical brown-bag cover and parental warning sticker are over the top, but so is the music on Illicit—and pretty much every release by Tribal Tech. By the time of this fifth album, guitarist Scott Henderson and bassist Gary Willis, the band’s co-founders, had formed the definitive Tribal Tech lineup with Scott Kinsey on keyboards and Kirk Covington on drums. Together they forged one of the most distinctive sounds in jazz fusion, far from the saccharine, generic, anonymous sound sometimes associated with the West Coast. That’s the subtext of the leadoff track, “The Big Wave” (by Willis), where a treacly, dentist-office intro gets inundated after 20 seconds by demonic riffs and patterns that erase all memory of what came before. Although Willis is formidable and gets a fair amount of solo space, Henderson is the dominant voice on Illicit. His searing hard-rock tone, bebop-schooled harmonic savvy, blues-soaked expression, and melodic imagination put him in the top tier of fusion virtuosos alongside Mike Stern, John Scofield, Robben Ford, and others, yet Henderson never sounded like any of them. Texturally and sonically, though not in terms of musical language, he’s arguably closest to Allan Holdsworth. On “Torque” and “Root Food” he’s moving into Eddie Van Halen territory. The term “beast” came into use to describe players like Henderson, yet there’s just as much to note about his musical refinement, even restraint. There’s also a lot of compositional detail to Tribal Tech, which partly accounts for how well the music has aged. Henderson and Willis each wrote four tunes, while “Riot” and “Aftermath” were collectively improvised (this was right at the time of the 1992 LA Riots). The shred element is also balanced by Kinsey’s futurist synth tones, warm and angular, a bit like Joe Zawinul (Henderson’s boss in the late-’80s Zawinul Syndicate).