Listen Up, Nerds 19: The Week of 3/17/23

A roundup of media from this week

It’s been a minute since I’ve done one of these but there have been PRESSING MATTERS that have demanded my attention! I went to LA! There was music journalist infighting! There was discussion of The Cancelled Shoegaze Band! But also the release calendar was kinda dry for the last month. I found myself listening to a lot of Lil Ugly Mane and Crushed. It was a month for some comfort food. This last week, I cracked out of that shell and got back into new stuff. Sorta. We’ll talk about it below.

Skourge - Torrential Torment

Last Friday, Lockin’ Out dropped the new Skourge record a few hours before I hopped on a plane to Soupfest. Last year, Lockin’ Out dropped the Flex record, my favorite hardcore record of 2022, on the day I left for Soupfest. In keeping with tradition, this is my favorite hardcore record of 2023 so far. I caught Skourge in 2019 at Advanced Perspective Weekend in Chicago by complete accident and it changed my world. I was deep in the throes of a youth crew phase and they ripped me right the hell out of it. They’ve been on my radar for a while, I listened to their Hardcore Up Your Ass EP more times than I can count last year. This new record is doing everything they’ve done on previous records even better. It’s faster, it’s heavier, and most of all, it’s fucking MEAN. This record sounds EVIL. The re-recorded version of “Old Gods Return” is one of the nastiest things committed to wax. The word “assbeater” is thrown around in hardcore circles but nothing compares to this. The cover is perfect. It’s a primary-color death metal dream of a hardcore record.

Pi (Aronofsky, 1998)

I went to Times Square and watched the remastered 25th anniversary edition of Pi in IMAX. I bought the ticket on a whim two weeks ago after thinking, “I did like that movie when I watched it in college 12 years ago, maybe I should see it again.” It was worth it! Aronofsky’s blown-out black and white thriller is still a wild ride through the eyes of the obsessed. It hits me deeper the longer I’ve lived in New York. There’s general distrust for people around the main character, the skepticism of reality outside of his world, even the want to sit in his apartment on the computer all of the time when the world is too much. To Max Cohen, the world is always too much all of the time. The world is a confusing place and searching for meaning is futile. Or is it? Anyway, definitely worth a watch/rewatch.

MSPAINT - Post-American

Do I like this album? I do. Do I expect to listen to it a lot? Not exactly. I loved MSPAINT’s demo the more time I spent with it, but there’s something about this nut that I find hard to crack. Maybe I expected too much? I thought that the demo was really pushing the envelope on punk in terms of grandiose song structure and unorthodox instruments, but this is very similar to the demo. Opening track “Information” is the logical conclusion of Democore: It’s a youth crew song for the Matrix (as a concept, not a film franchise). The record doesn’t use its inventive sound as a gimmick but I don’t think it’s the future of hardcore. It is, however, a delightful foray into Cyberpunk as a music genre and not as an aesthetic. It’s a good record, all things considered, but the hubbub around it doesn’t do it any favors. The songs are good, and I think they’re a great live band. Records are allowed to be Good without being Great. I’ve listened to Good records more often than I’ve listened to Great ones. This isn’t an underwhelming debut by any means but I’m more excited to see whatever they do next.

Rick Rubin on the Lex Fridman podcast

Rick Rubin is my problematic fav. I started listening to his new book this week and I always enjoy hearing him talk about his process. More importantly, I’m a fan of how he listens and how carefully he talks. Rubin is concise, easily understood, and generally pleasant in interviews. Fridman is an out-of-his-depth dipshit whose popularity is concerning. This interview sucks and everything I’ve been told about Fridman, who may be very smart when it comes to AI, is suspect. I saw a guy do karaoke last weekend who clearly didn’t know the song he picked outside of its lead guitar riff, but you don’t sing the riff at karaoke, do you? Anyway this is how Fridman comes off. He’s got this interview, he hasn’t prepared, and he doesn’t even sound like he knows what music is. I’ve come away learning even more here, and that’s that Rubin knows how to explain what he does in a very simplified way, so that even the toddlers among us can understand. Don’t listen to this, just read that paragraph and take it to heart.

Stone Temple Pilots - Purple

I know that Nirvana is trotted out as the ‘90s band but I think that STP gives them a run for their money some 30 years later. Is their cultural footprint as big as Nirvana’s? Hell no. Are they anywhere near as good as Nirvana? Not a chance. But think about the 1990s. They weren’t that good. Think about Sock ‘Em Boppers. Moon Boots. Capri Sun. Operation Desert Storm. It was a time of empty promises and the same rampant capitalism we see today, albeit with less rent-seeking from every single avenue. Purple is an example of the same sort of thing. It’s not that good, but it’s not a bad record. It’s a dumb guy’s version of branching out into new sounds by getting a little softer here and a little more twangy there. It sounds like a guy with a soul patch wearing a mechanic’s uniform as a fashion statement, but I’ll be damned if “Big Empty” isn’t one of the best songs of the ‘90s.

Marlon Dubois - “Tub”

Was digging around through the DJ Smokey producer tag meme (see above) and found this. Marlon Dubois and his friends are a bunch of dudes from New England who drink lean and rap about wearing cool clothes while incorporating memes and jokes into the lyrics. They all dedicate themselves to the Nod lifestyle (iykyk) and hang out and make music in Marlon’s shed. They even have a group called Shed Theory, which is like if every member of Brockhampton was a Grailed power user who sold all of his archive Rick Owens for Percocet. The beat is nuts, the DJ Smokey tags are outlandish (“IF YOU’RE LISTENING TO THIS SONG, YOU HAVE BEEN SHADOW CURSED FOR ETERNITY”), and the bars are solid. Most of the stuff that these guys do is purposely unintelligible to add to the opiate-addled aesthetic they’re cultivating but this is not. You probably won’t dig this but I sure do! I’ll see you next week.