Review Summary: we can only hope this is both the best and worst thing you've ever listened to we can only hope this is both the best and worst thing you've ever listened to we can only hope etc. etc.
The universe is a cold, dead place. We don’t know if we’re the only species alive in the universe. Hell, we don’t even know if
we’re real, or if our universe is real, or if anything is real. Time is an everlasting terminal illness, claiming us in nanoseconds and leaving no trace. We’re all going to die in the end, and nothing will exist anymore. Nothing matters, and I know nothing matters, because I’m sitting in a disgusting messy room, on a disgusting cloudy day, listening to an album called
Sautéed Buttholes.
I mean, I listened to
How To Ruin America with a fervent passion semi-ironically. It was cool at the time, one month ago, when people were still passionate in their election depression and it hadn’t progressed to the mix of sheer apathy or smugness or suicide on all sides of the spectrum. I even kind of liked it, in a ***ed up way. Surely I’m a madman for legitimately listening to this conceptually lacking, less unified prequel and lo-fi mix of whatever the *** it is. I know I am probably a madman. I’m okay with that now.
This album is over 47 minutes long. I don’t know why this album is over 47 minutes long. This album has 27 tracks. I don’t know why this album has 27 tracks, and I don’t know why I’m listening to every single one of them. I don’t know why the titular Funky Bunch are singing about apricots and peaches to the tune of
3 Doors Down’s Kryptonite. I don’t know why the joy of five friends attacking all that comes their way with irreverence, an intentional lack of trying and 4chan-savvy humour works one minute and sounds like a pool-cleaning podcast the next. I don’t know why broccoli makes them sad. I don’t know why, in some far alternate dimension in line with the multiverse theory, more than one person has voted for this album on SputnikMusic.com and treated it as a modern classic in line with Kurt Cobain’s
Montage of Heck Deluxe Edition. I don’t know why these lovable idiots somehow managed to out-Cobain the levels of ***ed-up-Cobain found on
Montage of Heck, and upend that ***ing cash-grab of dick cheese and anti-depressant madness. I don’t know why the song titles have to mention Hayden’s Droopy Dolphin Dick, or detail events like a Sandstorm in Cullen’s Asshole. I don’t know why this album avant-gardes the *** out of avant-garde and makes Pink Floyd hatred uber-meta. I don’t know why pop culture exists just so these men can reference it for the sake of it without an arbitrary connection to anything, you ***ing anarchists with guitars. I don’t know why they do anything they do.
I don't know if I have the ability to write a good review in me anymore. I don’t know anything. ODE Willie’s Funky Bunch probably know the same amount as me. Maybe even less. They’ve created a slice of life, a snapshot of five months of recording that could make up a modern philosopher’s wet dream, a modern experimentalist’s status quo and five jars worth of a modern music critic’s ear blood. I want to applaud them. I want to verbally murder them and move on with my life, so I can write the same ***, gushing, ineloquent reviews for my favourite bands, or the same ***, on-the-fence, mildly angry reviews for the occasional album I can’t stand. I can’t do any of those things. It can only exist in the middle ground, somewhere where asking to name a song “Nipple Teats” and cracking jokes about German bratwurst can be treated with love and despair simultaneously. Somewhere, there is a place where a numerical rating like mine means nothing. Where words mean nothing. Where nothing means nothing, and the beginning and end of everything is seamed together like a human centipede, and all the colours we've never comprehended merge into one prism of shining awfulness and beauty. Truly, we live in a great purgatory.
Don’t ***ing listen to this album.
