If popular music is dead and done and there’s nowhere left to go, rising duo 100 gecs, from St Louis, Missouri, are here to prove there’s still deranged fun to be had cannibalising the corpse. The second album from the pair, both in their late twenties and with a background in electronic production, is a post-modern assault, garish and unapologetic, part satire (possibly), part avant-punk noisiness, and part wilfully infantile and ridiculous. While not aiming to be "pleasant" listening, the sheer don’t-give-a-fuck-ness is invigorating.
Dylan Brady and Laura Les clearly have a thing about what used to be called “nu metal”, bands such as Limp Bizkit and Linkin Park, because, in amongst the shonky video game sound effects and glitched synth distortion, they revel in hip hop metal riffery on cuts such as “Hollywood Baby”, “Billy Knows Jamie”, which descends into raging death metal growling, and bleep-tronic opener “Dumbest Girl Alive”.
But, like Oneohtrix Point Never and the late Sophie, the range is wildly wide, drawing from a preposterously expansive palette, cheesy Autotune rubbing shoulders with Aphex-“Come To Daddy” cacophony and stomping Kiss-like choruses. The subject matter ranges from the nuts Schlager-style nursery rhyme ditty “Frog on the Floor”, about an amphibian gatecrasher (“Will you buy my friend a beer, he’s got flies in his mouth and he needs to wash them down”), to a song that simply repeats the words “One Million Dollars” to a backing track akin to being repeatedly bashed around the head with a plank.
Perhaps the most formally "good" song is “Doritos & Fritos”, which combines Autotune with angular punk-funk, noisy guitar and stream-of-consciousness lyrics that seem to be about aimless, repetitive global touring banality. It emanates something of The Deathset; no bad thing.
At ten cuts, all short, seven of them under three minutes, 10,000 gecs assaults the listener, a raging hotch-potch of hyper ideas. Whether you enjoy it or not – after three listens I dig about 50% - there’s something thrilling about it. Plastic and wilfully ugly in places, it delivers a kick. In a world where too much music is focused on niceness, “quality” and retro-feel comfort, that’s welcome.
Below: Watch the video for "Doritos and Fritos" by 100 gecs
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