Mindless Self Indulgence has been making music since 1997, and it can be pretty tricky to stay relevant. Well, maybe it’s hard for a lesser band, because Mindless Self Indulgence is fresh, current, and just plain fun on their latest album, ’How I Learned To Stop Giving A Shit And Love Mindless Self Indulgence’.
Relying heavily on electronic music, this album is rife with sweet beats, interesting rhythms, and funny tongue-in-cheek, often vulgar lyrics. To wit, the album begins with loud cursing and sarcastic self-aggrandizing lyrics on ‘Witness’. For me, it’s the lyrics that really make this album great. The band does not take themselves seriously, and it’s really great to listen to an album without riding along an emotional roller coaster and walk away exhausted and bummed out. This is the antithesis of emotion. It’s purely fluff, but somehow ends up with substance.
Take ’Kill you In A Hip Hop Rage’ for example; besides the superfast rapping and great use of staccato rhythms in vocals and sound, it has brilliant lyrics. It’s all about the good ‘ol days of rap, when a rapper would just kill you in a hip hop rage. There’s call outs to ODB and Easy E, and while it’s incredibly silly, the points are so well thought out. It’s like a well-thought-out discussion. The same can be said with ’Casio’, which is almost a love song to the days of calculator watches and cassette players in cars. It has harsher, more intense sounding vocals accompanied by the most random subject matter ever.
Besides the lyricism, the music is great. As I said before, it’s heavily electronic, but it’s extremely well done. It is clean and logical and avoids being a mess of noise that this type of music can fall in to. There’s a ton of references to musical styles too. ’Hey Tomorrow Fuck You And Your Friend Yesterday’ has a very light, pop sound with a slower, 80s -like ballad chorus that beckons Queen references. The last track on the album isn’t just referential, but a cover of Supertramp’s ’The Logical Song’ that stays pretty true to the original with electronic touches.
This ridiculous album, while solid most of the way through, does have a few missteps. This may be just because the album has 14 tracks, and that’s just a few too many for a solid performance. ’Stalkers’ is a bit messy and ‘Anonymous’ is monotonous and one-note, and a few others get lost in the shuffle. But overall, this album is a strong compilation of exciting, vulgar, ridiculous, intricate music that could easily be put on repeat for days.
4/5
’How I Learned To Stop Giving A Shit And Love Mindless Self Indulgence’ by Mindless Self Indulgence is out now on Metropolis Records.
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Words by Jenny Gagas (@Jenny_herself)
