Review of '3:15:20' by Childish Gambino

Childish Gambino loves to surprise the hell out of his fans.

Double Review: 'Year of the Snitch' by Death Grips and 'Oil of Every Pearl's Un-insides' by SOPHIE

Rhythmless hip hop and undanceable EDM – these two albums are certainly challenging.

INTRODUCING: Dopest Gringo Alive

Meet DGA (Dopest Gringo Alive).

Review of 'World Eater' by Blanck Mass

If you prefer your electronica devoid of sunshine and rainbows, World Eater is certain to have the dark and twisted thrills you desire. However, you’ll also need to be a more patient listener than I am.

Review of 'Splendor & Misery' by clipping.

Blunt, rapey lyrics aren’t usually my thing. I put up with them on this noise-hop trio's latest EP Wriggle (released earlier this year) because the infectiousness made up for it, although I couldn’t help but feel frontman Daveed Diggs was discouragingly dumbing himself down. Where was the vivid and gritty storytelling of previous albums?

Review of 'How To Ruin Other People's Futures' by Losers

How To Ruin Other People’s Futures is an album that’s as unfriendly as its title – which is good because after hearing industrial banger ‘This is a War’ (recently featured in my best tracks of the week) I would have been pretty disappointed had the rest of the album been meditative ambient music.

Review of 'Wriggle' by clipping.

Clipping (stylised ‘clipping.’ but for punctuation’s sake we’ll call them Clipping) continue to make music out of the most unmusical ideas conceivable, this time centreing their creepy lyrics around sex. The result is Wriggle - an EP that will either get you wriggling uncomfortably in your seat or wriggling with masochistic joy.

INTRODUCING: Little Death Machine

It’s time to introduce and interview another idiosyncratic band I found on the internet. Meet Little Death Machine.

Review of 'The Powers That B' by Death Grips

The Californian experimental hip hoppers continue to push sonic boundaries on their supposedly final album, but is it an explosive enough ending to make up for their unpredictable and action-packed career?

When friends, family members and random elderly strangers in the street ask me why I like Death Grips, my response is usually something illogical and vague like ‘because they’re nuts’. The truth is, I’m not entirely sure myself as to why I love Death Grips. Their music is largely unmusical. Vocalist MC Ride sounds like a hobo whose stubbed his toe and even with a lyric sheet, it’s hard to make out whether he’s spurting out dense poetry or simply nonsense.

'I'm epiphanic amnesia! I'm in Jimmy Page's castle! I'm off the planet!' - MC Ride

In many ways, it is simply the mystery of not understanding Death Grips that is the appeal – that and the fact that their raw aggression is so primal and thrilling.

Last year, scrawled apathetically on the back of a napkin as is their style, the band announced their breakup, stating: ‘We are now at our best and so Death Grips is over’. Assuming it’s not just another publicity stunt, The Powers that B is the group’s final album.

Essentially it’s two records disguised as a double album. The first half, N****s on the Moon, was released before the band’s breakup and I rambled briefly about it on this blog. Having listened to it a few times, I’ve grown to appreciate it. It’s the band’s most proggy album yet, consisting of complex songs with changing time signatures, interspersed with random chopped-up Bjork vocals. MC Ride’s voice meanwhile is at its most clearest, whilst his lyrics are some of his most impenetrable: ‘melanin pewter cellophane/ arms as long as their legs/ even the greys can’t/ voila’.

The second part of The Powers that B was released a couple weeks ago and is titled Jenny Death. Unlike its counterpart, there’s less progginess, less word salad and less chopped-up Bjork vocals. In fact, the glitchy Bjork vocals have been traded in completely for a new motif – guitars. Many of the songs contain distorted hardcore punk riffs – namely ‘Turned Off’ and ‘Why a Bitch Got A Lie’. Whilst N****s on the Moon is the band’s proggiest release, Jenny Death can be viewed as their most punky.  

Prog and punk are essentially ying and yang musically – one celebrating depth and complexity, the other celebrating rawness and simplicity. Consequently, the two halves of The Powers That B don’t feel very cohesive as a whole. Maybe it was Death Grips’ intention to show how schizophrenic they can be stylistically. Personally, I feel I’m tempted to listen to one at a time rather than both as a whole, suggesting they should be two separate albums.

The album is certainly their most extreme work to date by all definitions of the word, which is something Death Grips have always tried to achieve with each release and hence would imply that this is a suitable finale to their career. The title track, ‘The Powers that B’, is their loudest and most abrasive banger since the opener to Government Plates.  ‘On GP’ meanwhile is their most depressive, containing some explicitly suicidal lyrics and ending rather powerfully on the line: ‘I’d be a liar if I sat here claiming I’d exit in a minute/ but I can’t say I wouldn’t have my limits.’. This itself is a heavy statement to end the band’s career on, and is further explored in the closing instrumental proceeding it entitled ‘Death Grips 2.0’. This closing track is the group’s fastest and most sinister sounding track so far and the ‘2.0’ in the title helps to end the album with an air of mystery – are Death Grips going to one day reform as more advanced version of themselves? Or have they reached their ‘limits’.

Most of these standout moments happen in the second half, Jenny Death, which leaves the first half, N****s on the Moon, feeling a bit redundant as part of the climax. That being said, the first half is still enjoyable and flows better than Jenny Death. The topic of sex is also explored more deeply on N****s on the Moon than any previous release, with tracks like ‘Fuck me out’ and the hilariously titled ‘Have a Sad Cum’ painting it as a depressive subject. It has always been Death Grips mission to turn hip hop clichés on their head, and this itself seems like an attack on sexual braggadocio. Arguably, Jenny Death contains the most blatant example – ‘Pss Pss’ being a charming trap-flavoured number about pissing on a girl’s face.

Overall, The Powers That B succeeds at doing what all Death Grips albums have done before it – it raises more questions than answers. Death Grips could never give us an explosive ending as this would require destroying the air of mystery that is so essential to their appeal. They’d have to reveal some major plot twist – ‘Death Grips were One Direction in disguise all along’ or something along those lines. Sadly, I don’t think the band have anything nearly as impressive to reveal, no dark hidden secrets, no grand plot to overthrow the music industry. However, I do believe there is more to their music than simply spontaneous noise for the sake of being noisy, and the desire to decipher this is what makes Death Grips so engaging. 

★★★★☆

TRACK TASTER:

Review of 'The Day Is My Enemy' by The Prodigy

It’s time to test those subwoofers and annoy your conservative elderly neighbours. UK rave veterans The Prodigy are back and they’re not about to go all ambient on us any time soon. In fact, this might just be the group’s loudest and most aggressive album to date. Sadly, it’s also their most forgettable.

Let’s get one thing clear first - this album is forgettable by Prodigy standards. The Day is My Enemy doesn’t contain any cheap house beats. There are no airhorn-loaded trap numbers. Compared to most EDM artists out there, these guys are still clearly attempting to be innovative and in some ways succedding. The percussion rhythms for one are reliably creative, the key ingredient in many of the group’s prior bangers such as ‘Spitfire’ and ‘Firestarter’. The beats on 'Rebel Radio' and 'Medicine' made me want to move and brandish glowsticks and rip my shirt off.

ME RAVING HARD TO THE BEATS ON THIS ALBUM

Hence, the issue with this album clearly lies elsewhere. Personally, I see the band's forgettability (if such a word exists) as being largely down to the texture of this album.

The synth tones deployed on this album are abrasive, but they’re simply not fresh. They’re essentially the same synth tones that were being used on Invaders Must Die. In fact, they’re the same synth tones that Pendulum were playing with a decade ago.

Clearly the griminess of these synth tones plays a large part in the aggressiveness of this album, but overall the moments that truly stand out on this record are the moments in which these abrasive synth tones take a break. Such moments include the 8-bit Nintendo-esque keys on ‘Wild Frontier’, the rave stabs on ‘Destroy’ and the driving guitar on ‘Invisible Sun’. Here, The Prodigy expand the sonic palette. Sadly, these moments are too few and far between, resulting in the remainder of the album feeling very samey.

Lyrics prove to also be a problem on The Day Is My Enemy. Whilst I can’t say I look for much introspection from The Prodigy, hooks such as ‘nasty nasty!’ and ‘Ibiiiza!’ do feel uninspired, especially when compared to the edginess of a past hook like ‘Smack my bitch up’ or ‘Take me to the hospital’.

‘Ibiza’ arguably redeems itself when it is revealed that the track is a jab at many current EDM artists’ live shows that involve plugging a USB stick into a laptop and waving their arms around for a bit. Here, The Prodigy prove their relevance in today’s music scene – they’re still the best live band in EDM.

It’s just a shame that as an album band, the same can no longer be said. 

★★★☆☆

TRACK TASTER:

Review of 'Fashion Week' by Death Grips

Fashion Week is the brand new surprise instrumental album from Death Grips – everyone’s favourite trolling experimental hip hop group who last year announced on the back of a napkin that they were breaking up. Despite disbanding, Death Grips have been continuing to put out new music. They released a single called ‘Inanimate Sensation’ in December. Now they’ve released this record. They have another half-album called Jenny Death scheduled for release soon.

Review of 'Gay Dog Food' by Mykki Blanco

‘I’m too freaky for these n****s/I’m too freaky for these bitches’

Review of 'Bestial Burden' by Pharmakon

Well, that's certainly put me off my steak and chips...

I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to listen to this for the first time at 1 am.  I should have guessed from the rather gristly album artwork and prior exposure to Pharmakon that this wasn’t going to be half an hour of cute and fun bubblegum pop.

Review of 'Clppng' by Clipping

Clipping are bursting with creative ideas on their second album.

Review of "Iller than Most" by Del the Funky Homosapien

American Underground MC, Del the Funky Homosapien, delivers a mixtape that’s minimalist to the max, throwing away any hint of social commentary or lyrical theme, instead serving up an album that is essentially just one big diss-fest to all the other current rappers in the game. His rhymes are witty and his conversational tone of delivery is engaging, but overall, nothing really sticks.

Review of "Aleph" by Gesaffelstein

Aleph is a cold and dark techno journey through futuristic hell. 

Review of "The Terror" by The Flaming Lips

WATCH VIDEO REVIEW HERE

Psychedelic rock band, The Flaming Lips, have always had experimental tendencies. But this album sees them venturing onto a whole new plain of reality.