[atsonicpark]

 

I thought for sure SYRFOX or somebody had started a thread on this group but I can't seem to find one. So....

Fucking insane stuff. Rap from Hell. Insane shit.

Basically, it's "chopped and screwed" stuff thati s purposely meant to be slowed way down. It's a cool sound, and the songs remain very busy and interesting. It literally sounds like Satan rapping, in hell, over voices moaning from god-knows-where. Songs will just abruptly stop and leave a squirting sound that goes on for a minute, as a new beat comes in and tries its hardest to do, uh, SOMETHING, and it fails. Each speaker has Satan rapping, trading "verses" back and forth. The whole thing sounds like a broken casette that is about to die at any second.

I was laughing throughout. Definitely a good time for all. Lots of broken hi hats going from speaker to speaker and melodies lazily limpin along.

Track 5 has what sounds like those ReDeads moaning from Ocarina of Time. Inventive as hell. Any sounds that are clear will, by the end of a track, be so distorted as to appear to have not existed at all the first times you heard them. A very clear casette aesthetic persists, as underneath the sounds are ghosts of sounds from earlier.

Fans of Anticon might like this... it definitely has the noisiness and abandon of Themselves - No Music, but this is waaaaay more out there than that. Someone told me they were reminded of Gang Gang Dance and Excepter, I can see that with some of the production definitely, if nothing else. Really, the only group that comes to mind is SUICIDAL RAP ORGY, who are a lot more conventional in some ways but a lot weirder in some other areas.

Anyway, in all serious, really cool atmospheres, interesting stuff.

[atsonicpark]

Bubblethug is an album that makes an immediate impact. I was passingly familiar with DJ Screw's codeine-fueled chopped-and-screwed aesthetic before I heard this album, but that did not quite prepare me for what Maherr has done. DJ Screw merely made songs sound a little drugged and eerie—Pat has gone so far down into the rabbit hole with slowed tempos and pitch-shifting that it is almost impossible to imagine what these hapless songs sounded like before they were "remixed." All that is left is a glacial beat being buffeted by impossibly slow, deep, and incomprehensible vocals that bubble, shudder, stretch, crackle, and quaver nightmarishly.
The overall effect lies somewhere between "sounds like a tape that has gone through a washing machine and possibly a fire" and "demonic possession." The songs all sound fairly similar to one another due to the nature of the project, but Bubblethug works best when Maherr takes on songs with strong hooks, like he does in the sixth song. When an actual vocal melody is ruined, the effect can be quite spectral and disquieting—it sounds a lot like my stereo is haunted. Most of the time, however, Pat just opts for straight-up rap vocals and the results vary a bit. Often, they are just disorienting and a little creepy, but sometimes they can get pretty phantasmagoric or even outright disturbing…like the vocalist is desperately trying to communicate something important to me while they are being dragged underwater. Maherr also makes an amusing and effective stab at the genre's trash-talking convention, as the seventh song actually allows an understandable line to slip through the maelstrom: "everybody's thinkin' they twisted." They are not twisted. Not like Pat.
The only catch is that Maherr did not fare quite as well at maintaining my attention as he did at grabbing it. After the initial impact of the audacious wrongness of this album subsided a bit, it started to yield rapidly diminishing returns. The reason for this is that Maherr simply did too effective of a job in his destruction of the source material—very few hooks survive and nearly all lyrical content is obliterated. Bubblethug is almost an hour of slooooooow hip hop beats and garbled, ruined voices and little else, which becomes grueling after a while. On rare occasions, like on the excellent opening song, enough of ravaged original melody and beat survive to carry the song, but too often Maherr relies solely on mindfuckery. Taken in small doses, this is a thoroughly ingenious and entertaining effort, but Pat needs to find something else to fill the inherent void if this project to going to have much long-term potential. That grievance aside, Bubblethug is still striking and deranged enough to wind up being an influential work.


- Great BRAINWASHED review..

[SpaceCadetHayden]

I'm sold.

[SYRFox]

Yes ! I love this record. Mad stuff. It was on heavy discount on boomkat a while ago, I should have bought it.
The name made me want to check it out when I heard it a few months ago. Needless to say, I was not disappointed.