Review Summary: A steaming turd in the form of a digital record
Need an excuse to skip out of the office? Need a way to avoid an inevitable family reunion? Need a really good excuse to get out of a really hairy situation? Here's one: listen to this album and you're guaranteed a headache within the next 20 minutes, or your money back! Wait no actually... if you paid for this you deserve to be scammed.
Well, that's my pitch, and I'll even explain to you why I feel this way. See, the original ‘Make It Bun Dem’ is a collaboration effort between Skrillex and Bob Marley’s youngest son Damian Marley. It's their attempt to pay homage to dubstep's roots, but in reality it comes across as nothing more than a detestable insult to the genre.
Gone are Skrillex’s catchy hooks and gut-punching drops; in their place are onerous reggae chants and repetitive, uninspired beats. The remixes themselves don’t do enough different to the original song to make it worth hearing again, let alone six more times with each time being more vomit inducing than the last. Thankfully there are some instrumental breaks from the awful sampling of Damian’s vocals in the French Fries and Flinch remixes, which are nothing special by themselves but when surrounded by the filth that encompasses the rest of the EP, these small breaks are somewhat of a godsend.
There really is nothing even remotely redeemable about
Make It Bun Dem After Hours. It's fair to say Skrillex reached his peak on
Scary Monsters and Nice Sprits and has been going downhill ever since, and this is it: rock bottom. Now he’s left releasing throwaway EPs like this to squeeze every bit of profit he can out of his huge (unfortunate) commercial success, until the public wakes up and realizes that he actually blows.
I recommend this EP to absolutely no one; unless of course, you need to get a headache within the next 20 minutes. In which case,
Make It Bun Dem After Hours may be exactly what you’re looking for.
