Review Summary: ever feel?
This album is incisive. Despite its blunt production and deliberate clumsiness and seeming inadequacy at doing anything correctly at all, it will slice you completely in half without making any mess on the carpet. The truth is heavy and so is this album. It is easy to see why this album is credited as inspiring/originating the sludge sound because it is thick and oozing and disgusting and would require some kind of really expensive industrial grade cleaning agent to remove properly. Just hearing the leering, jeering sincerity in the lyrics will core you like a pumpkin at Halloween. The stone cold truths spoken on this album will make you wonder about yourself and the world and look around the room in sheepish, private terror to try and see if anyone else feels the same way and you will never truly know. Clap along to opener "Ever" like the member of a species of parasitic failure that you are and inwardly admit the answer is 'yes' to all of the questions that are asked and just as you really get into it and are waiting for the answer to all of these crushing existential maladies and how to fix yourself and finally be a proper person and do some real good on this Earth find out the only answer is "so what?".
Professional misanthropy apologists Flipper are a band that employ militantly unrehearsed vocals with scornful lyrics that would make Shakespeare say "damn...". The bass playing is absolutely dismal, just really depressing all the time. Some real stone cold hopelessness to be found here folks, a straight up dejection injection directly into the brain’s heart. But even though it sounds like it is lumbering through an endless downward spiral into the dirt of a forgotten forever the bass is consistently the only thing holding together the absolute sordid, ragged mess of other instrumentation going on; the buzz of guitar and haphazard slap of drums, all the band members sounding like they’re about to give up at any given time but never quite doing so and holding up a mirror to the listener’s own begrudging compliance with the perverse, self deprecating pleasure to be gleefully carved from each song.
Just as distorted and repetitive as real life, each song features smirked quips such “Life is the only thing worth living for”, haplessly shrugged recognitions like “that's the way of the world", unerring sardonic one liners like "life is pretty cheap it's not hard to find", and proud cynicisms such as "who cares anyway, who listens to what I say // this song rhyme's and we play it in time" which are just a small selection of the unadulterated truths to be heard here. But even though Flipper know stuff is bad they also do not really give a sh
it: "Nothing" even starts with the hilarious and intentionally amateurish "right... everybody start at the same time, ready?" to really highlight the non-existent respect Flipper have for their medium.
Beneath the chiding, schizophrenically self aware lyrics Flipper wrote some devastatingly real and raw societal angst. Epic "(I Saw You) Shine" takes responsibility to air out an exhausted, delirious truth that every human knows deep within themselves. Just try and hear the words “I'VE GOT TO STRIP THIS FLESH FROM MY BONES” and “I’VE GOT TO HAMMER THE WALLS WITH MY HANDS” and not feel the exact same way. The seething accusation of “I SAW YOU SHINE” is message to the inner core of every single listener, informing them that Flipper know just as well as they do that they are exactly the same as every other person in that they aren't doing the best they possibly can with their lives and they should just feel terrible about it.
"Sex Bomb" is the ultimate song of acceptance. Contextually it is probably one of the best album closers ever. A singular primal acknowledgement of what humans are really for: compulsively mushing together their weird sexual organs in a crude, disgusting, ritualised ordeal that their brains will probably never truly grasp how to question or resist, and then afterwards making sure to brag about it to all their fellow narcissistic apes. There is a rare legitimate inner peace within the uninhibited "whhooOOOAAAA"s and other bestial enunciations that soar over the thrumming bass and spectacularly cheesy saxophones (complete with an absolutely catastrophic solo) that are juxtaposed to some seriously irreverent feedback/distortion guitar fu
ckery that are like a complete admission to what a disgusting, predictable creature man really is to the point where you will want to shoot your own dick and/or clit right in the head. But even if you do choose to mutilate your own genitalia you will still want to dance to the song because the grooves are true and utterly self-indulgent and maybe you will lament not just using your swollen members just one more time because it does feel really good doesn't it. Anyway, if anyone wants to have sex please message me.
