slayyyter

concert review TBD

quick review of the bible (new slayyyter album)

totally forgot that WOR$T GIRL IN AMERICA was dropping today until i happened to scroll past the popheads megathread and immediately bolted to spotify at an alarming speed. in general this is frankly a ridiculously fantastic album deserving of zero skips. i mean, opening with DANCE alone…i’ve had this on repeat since whenever it was released (early jan?) and that minute long titillating intro clawing its way to the beat drop always makes my brain conjure visions of the seedy sexy trashy underbellies of party america that she’s crafted and perfected for this era. i imagine this is what being on lsd feels like.

BEAT UP CHANEL$ very very nasty beat & production, especially in the prechorus and that outro…the processing on her vocals is so abrasive yet finely tuned it’s hard not to get immediately sucked in

CANNIBALISM my favorite out of the first six singles. that bassline somehow feels both dangerous and playful/satirical at the same time. great mix of the lower toned gothy poutiness of the verses and the brash prechoruses

OLD TECHNOLOGY very gesaffelstein of her

CRANK nastiest chorus out of this entire album. just incredibly electric and relentless and narcotizing, i CANNOT imagine what experiencing this performed live would feel like. “He wanna fuck Slayyyter, Richard, we should link later” is an incredible line

GAS STATION this one is very lady gaga circa the fame…also somewhat reminds me of ladytron destroy everything you touch? and throw allie x into the mix

YES GODDD that last minute is like a skrillex mashup made sexy

UNKNOWN LOVERZ this is practically a pop ballad compared to the rest of the album. more forgettable in this context but still good

OLD FLING$ reminds me of older charli songs/early to mid 2010s moody dance pop songs in general, which is a genre i really like! chucking this into my rotation

I’M ACTUALLY KINDA FAMOUS and $T. LOSER back to back is really funny sequencing…like the first is her being sneery bitchy haughty and above it all and the second is about how she’s about to explode from feeling loserish and insecure. also was delighted by the similarities between the synths in imakf and onuka vidlik. st loser is sleeper hit material i do hope it takes her all the way up

WHAT IS IT LIKE, TO BE LIKED? slayyyter you should collab with yves

PRAYER the first two seconds made me think this would interpolate lady gaga g.u.y. but they were just church organs lmfao

BRITTANY MURPHY really magnificent, with shockingly sad and poignant lyrics punctuated by the cheery electronic production. the part in the last third when her voice distorts and becomes resigned is really haunting. just excellent songwriting all around. to start the album with a seedy club song about washing her brains out with sex and dancing and then closing it mourning those impulses and her choices and herself…her music is so indelible and genius and moving

pasting this reddit comment here for posterity:

I’m just gonna say it, “BRITTANY MURPHY.” is automatically the best song in her discography. It’s this weird hybrid between Ladytron’s Seventeen with Empire of the Sun’s We Are the People, and that blink-and-you’ll-miss-it melodic interpolation of U2’s City of Blinding Lights as the cherry on top… I don’t know who else would think of it and pull it off. It really feels like the next frontier of her songwriting skills with really compelling storytelling from the perspective that only she provides. It’s just… the pop song equivalent of a Sean Baker movie. The way it begins like a classic tabloid-y mixtape song and then just… distorts and falls apart, and from there on constantly fluctuates between the Stars Behaving Badly and Obituaries pages, and how you can just feel the angst of having this facade and then having it betray her in the end and her reckoning with it all.

But of course, the whole album is brilliant. I get vivid flashbacks of DJ Hero mixes (specifically the Hella Good x Television Rules the Nation mashup), that one heavy Crystal Castles-esque remix of Hilary Duff’s Come Clean that took the original’s place on her Best Of, Kylie Minogue’s Soulwax/Chemical Brothers/Fischerspooner/Mylo remixes phase, the rockier remixes from the Confessions era for that matter, Bat for Lashes and the general 2000s electronica scene… I could go on but it’s just such a rich, sophisticated, editorial tapestry of indie sleaze nostalgia without feeling tired or cliche, which is in and of itself such a massive skill for how aggressive and grimey it all is. It’s well thought out and pushes the trend to its more untapped limits.

At this point, even I think that Gaga has lowkey become low hanging comparison fruit around her, but that being said, there is something very… Born This Way in how after an album full of delusional polished grandeur, she immediately pivoted to an album that’s all about this Americana nostalgia through a gritty European synthetic lens. Actually, I’d go even further and maybe say it’s closer to Madonna’s American Life in how it does that electroclash-Americana with this underlying existentialism and identity crisis at play. Maybe even a touch of Xtina’s Bionic if she went full-on with her gut instincts and had more sessions with Ladytron, Santigold, MIA, Le Tigre and Peaches. But obviously, much more CRANKED up and having the unique grit that only a 64kbps MP3 download from LimeWire turned MySpace page song could provide.