Babyland
You Suck Crap

LA RECENSIONE

Here's another epochal album that (perhaps) only the one who created it remembers: only the DeBasio can proudly afford the luxury of inspecting it in every nook and cranny and defenestrating it in HousePage.

Now: it's not like I'm asking you to listen to me.
It's well known that it's better to avoid indulging fools.

What I would propose to you is to evaluate your reaction to listening to this kind of madness in the form of microgrooves, recorded by these two flood-stricken Californians just a few million years ago:
by setting the cuckoo clock back 25 years (beware of the 8-hour time zone difference), you'll have a clear picture of the geo-stationary situation that gave rise to the long-distance debut of the myth-makers Babyland.

Are you aware of industrialoid bastions like Ministry, Skinny Puppy, and Front Line Assembly that during those years were aggressively erecting their harpoons from the darkest underground?

Well: they have nothing to do with it.
Or almost.

Or better, they are connected (are they?). But only sideways.
Ah, there we go.
Therefore, they are not connected, even if they connect.

As an illustrative example, I would extrapolate at random a track from the lot: "Under", track #12 on the album. It was the first fragment I listened to: that tactical-rhythmic mess really left me dumbfounded.

This unbridled and flexible abuse of various electronic gadgets, perpetrated like blunt weapons, manipulated to secrete the most unimaginable blips, boings, and booms amidst beudin screams and rhythms ranging from heavily danceable to the purest and most uncompromising cacophony: their continuous and exhausting changes in pace, tone, and mood - often within the same track - are one of their peculiar characteristics.

The album is "tough" but boasts at least a handful of siderurgical peaks pleonastically sidereal: the spasmodic "Logan's Run", inspired by the apocalyptic film from the mid-seventies, the crazy cover of "Burning Up" by Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, and the extremely unbalanced "Smrow-Toh", also released in a 12" version, fall into the aforementioned category; paroxysmal raids filled to the brim with speeds on the brink of the prohibitive, stretched towards absolute nothing: the beauty is that they often reach the absolute.
And it's a fantastic nothingness.

As it might not have been understood, the 16 tracks that make up "You Suck Crap" could be classified under the DeGenere techno-industrial, but unlike the multitude of monolithic themes that often characterized (or characterize) that type of sound, these two rascals have (or had) their own playful and anarchic attitude, which grants them rightful access to the pantheon of DeGenere Viking.
Later they will slightly adjust their aim by normalizing their trajectories; but in this "thing", the feeling is that they really did whatever came to mind without setting any limits or problems.

We could use more Vikings like that today.