Review Summary: WHAT'S HAPPENI-
WOAH.
Christ, I'm covered in drool.
I'm gonna need a couple minutes. Sorry. My brain is lit up like a Muse show right now.
Okay. We'll have to start simple. Bear with me. SHLIMP WARC has two members. They are Tatsuya Yoshida (Ruins), and Makoto Kawabata (Acid Mothers Temple). Or is it Yoshida Tatsuya (Ruins) and Kawabata Makoto (Acid Mothers Temple)? I don't know. How do Japanese names work? Where am I? Do I know anything anymore?
Uh, let's see. Here's a press release. Allegedly, this album revels in the sort of 'kinetic energy of Ruins and Acid Mothers Temple at their most full-frontal and ecstatic.' Does that clear things up? Probably not. Okay, okay. There's definitely a drummer. There's also a guitarist. There's keys both synthesised and organic. There's noise. There's noise! Right, right. It's all coming back to me. Lemme just pierce my sternum with this epinephrine real quick...
WOAH. That's the kind of bare-faced, visceral reaction that
THGIE DRSOW will evoke in anybody that traverses the full-length of its 32 minutes. It's the musical equivalent of throwing buckets of paint at a wall without opening them. Have you ever wondered what a drum track that solely consists of fills might sound like? Well, come on in, the water's turbulent. It's almost comical how the kick drum keeps time throughout opening excursion “OEN” when you consider that the rest of the instrumentation is on a strict diet of 'f
uck it.' In fact, if this album
was a diet, it'd consist of ramming sour confectionery down your gullet in between mouthfuls of party pills for weeks on end. If it was an exercise regime it'd be some ungodly combination of competitive Dance Dance Revolution and slam dancing. If it was a self-help book, it'd be titled
How to Completely and Utterly Lose Your Shit: A Cautionary Tale.
In more tangible terms,
THGIE DRSOW is an album of wild musical freakouts that take place over some old loops that were left on the cutting room floor a few years back when this duo collaborated with Richard Pinhas. For trivia's sake, let it be known that that project was named [WOAH Black Betty] Bam Balam. The elements at play here involve synths (often running sequencers) that act as anchors, centring the music and providing what limited constancy you may find here; drumming that is simultaneously frantic and hyper-precise; and guitar playing so deranged that it's hard to identify what's even happening at times. There are also some keys that aren't looped — so there's obviously been some input in the ivory department from someone or other after the fact — and they're also f
ucking unhinged; “REETH”'s keys are so atonal that they could find neither a tonic in a tavern nor a root in a brothel.
There is more musicality bubbling underneath this mire than I may have hinted at. The shifting tonal centre of a song like “WOT” certainly doesn't make hitting all of the right (wrong?) notes any easier, and the project at large is paced so awkwardly fast that it's as if you're watching a Games Done Quick playthrough of
QWOP. As much as it might be tempting to suggest that you'd get similar results if you were to put a two year-old in a romper next to a piano and leave Death Grips'
Interview 2016 blasting for the wee tyke to improvise over, this would be overlooking the fact that consistently hitting the wrong notes at the right time is
hard.
Let's not pretend everyone's going to like
THGIE DRSOW. Let's not even pretend that a group of people even slightly resembling a majority will. This is pure, push-the-boundaries, love-it-or-hate-it type sh
it. It's inaccessible, it's not particularly dynamic, and it's not virtuosic in an outwardly clever enough way to pull in all the theory-nerds. Despite the talent so flagrantly on display throughout the record, the end result is a kind of primal sludge of authentic mania.
Why do I suddenly sound apologetic? This ain't your
grandma's music, man.
THGIE DRSOW is the last person awake at the party, babbling to themselves in the corner, probably in need of medical attention. It's the guy recklessly throwing fists in the crowd while The Wiggles are performing. Real talk — there's as much wild nonsensical noise here as there would be if Charlie Sheen, Tim Allen, and Robert Downey Junior played Articulate at 6 A.M. after a night on the slopes. Whether you leave this experience aggravated, terrified, or ecstatic largely depends on your latent levels of masochism.
