Review Summary: Even listening for the jokey meme cheese under the gross frat duding, this album doesn't deliver a lot.
You know this isn't a good album. It's now about gauging the nostalgia-irony-meme appeal that we can slurp up from this definitively obnoxious album. I saw Brad and Steve (or whatever their names are) live around 2014 and it was fun - there's no way you can be millennial trash like me and not shout sing with gusto that goofy-as-hell line, "I'm a vegetarian and I ain't ***ing scared of him." Brad's voice there has the perfect cocktail of over-serious whiteboy melodrama and memey joke cheese. But then you have to live with "never trust a ho" and the Helen Keller bit which ages about as well as a Katy Perry feature. Speaking of which, other standout tracks are that one with KP, "Starstrukk" about their repressed suburban fantasy of living out that Axe commercial and "Richman" where Brad has that great poetic line, "And I ain't sippin' on a mixed drink, pinkie out, lips pink / Talkin' to a rich skank filled up like a sperm bank." Clearly, the duo likes to wear the sexist stuff on their sleeve to attention-grab, but often the tunes suck by leaning too much into this and the super-cringe weird stuff. Take "Photofinnish," with Steve's incoherent dogbarking "Oh it's a yip, yip" (or so says a lyric site) and Steve's nasal Eminem-impersonating, "photo finish gettin' women like we hire 'em." Yikes guys, pretty gross stuff. The last track worth talking about is "Punkbitch," with the standout lyrics of: "Ladies lookin' at me tell 'em, 'come and get some,'/ 'Cause I'm sippin' on some Jack/ Sip, Sippin' on some Gin/ Tip, tippin' all these strippers like I know them as my friends." Now, these boys are obviously not acquainted with strippers - they're snowboarding in Aspen with their bros and making dick jokes about what their buds' heads look like in the snow. That's pretty much the message one gets underneath all the pukey lyric jokes about women as hoes in heat, strippers, or receptacles.
On listening to the album as a whole, I'd say the worst parts sonically are when tall Steve gets any vocal time at all, when Brad does the grating whine like on "Photofinnish," and when they opt for oversaturated synth and vocal wobbles like on "Richman." Getting through all of the tracks is a slog. I recently dug up an old purple Nano (c. 2011) with a handful of their songs. Maybe 6 tracks is enough to reminisce and chuckle but I don't suggest going over them more than once unless you want the irony to morph into thinking current you a piece of ***.
