Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Two Bullets: Squarepusher



It's a sad day when you're teenage idols go the way of your mid life crisis addled parents, trading in their own style for some pale imitation of what they think is young and trendy. Sadly it seems Squarepusher is the latest musician to go the way of Ed Hardy jackets and phallic sports cars as he embraces a live band/electro sound with latest project Shobaleader One.

If I'm honest though I think this has to be some sort of either piss-take, or piss-weak attempt at cashing in. Megazine (above) sounds like a poor man's Daft Punk, delivering a repetetive and cheesy fuzzed out bassline under laughable vocoded vocals.

This is a live band though, no programming or backing tracks, and part of the idea behind the project might be to show that a live band can make electro and not sound like a bunch of pathetic bullshit munchers like The Klaxxons or something, but regardless of that, the music is still an unimaginative appropriation of a genre that has long passed it's used by date.

It really does sound like it's a joke though, the vocals especially sounding like they could be taken from one of those South Park 'now you're a mayong' songs.

The single, Cryptic Motion



isn't much better, delivering a sort of spacey RnB vibe, that also sounds cheap and tawdry. None of these songs have any depth, they just sound like shallow exercises in borrowing aesthetics, with no emphasis on composition.

Having stated in an interview that "the basic premise at the outset was 'space pop' - a Utopian pop music hallucination. It's a stand against the affectation of knowing indifference in urban life and its corollary in music. I've always wanted to sabotage coolness as for me music is about laughing and crying, not about standing around smoking cigarettes," I can sort of see how the music's ended up where it is, but it's still sad to see one of the most challenging artists of modern times fielding such nonsense, instead of focusing on what he does best.

At best the music reminds me a bit of this blog, an artist's pathetic attempt to undermine what offends him.

Two Bullets, to the back of the head, and mine.

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