Review Summary: screm
Hello, welcome, nice to see you, good evening. Review: begin. Poppy is a gimmick-hawking meme artist for people into plasticated popfusion nonsense (cool) and/or with nonexistent attention spans (not cool). Earlier this year, her album
I Disagree combined asinine pop hooks with yesterday’s nu-metal riffage and was more than reasonably successful because both the asinine pop market and the perduring nu-metal fanbase are devastating pushovers. Her
new new record
Music to Scream To is a self-produced noise album that will likely be less successful because Poppy’s pushover fanbase does not listen to noise, and noise fans likely know well enough to leave this kind of halfarsed computershit well alone. We’re going a bit
ad hominem here, but this album’s craft and scope are so mindnumbingly reductive and unrepresentative of the qualities that (in my experience) make good noise worthwhile that I feel no need to make any pretence of integrity here.
That said, let’s talk about music. Before we get to
this music, it’s probably wise to confront what, for many, will be the inevitable elephant in the room: what is good noise, and how should it make you feel? Well…uh, in my view, the great thing about noise is that the answer to that question is
who cares? It’s a genre of possibilities and impossibilities and acts of irreverence and defiance of convention that doesn’t really exist anywhere else. The noise albums that I’ve ~enjoyed the most have all been beautiful or hideous or visceral or arresting in ways that could never have been expressed otherwise. When good noise is challenging, it’s exciting because it feels like you’re being subjected to a tone or technique or musical accident that is actively demanding
something of you, based on your preconceptions, comfort zone, current mood, or literally whatever.
Music Ice Cream Too is a fairly challenging album, but this is entirely due to the tedium of hearing Poppy repeatedly draw her churning loops of digitalised wank for unforgivable seconds and
minutes beyond their allotted windows for mercy killings. The sheer transparency of the crudeness behind this album’s production demystifies any trace of a hope it might have had at conjuring that transgressive intrigue that noise lives and dies by: you can practically see her dragging the repeat function across her DAW interface, and once that images surfaces, these tracks are just one soulless note after another. Oh boy, do they keep coming.
Now comes the point at which we shall address the tracks individually. They are all called “Scream” with varying numbers of “m”s, because this album has the word “Scream” in the title and it is a gimmick album. Let’s go through them quickly: Scream #1 is a redundant introduction track, Scream #2 is a digitalised copy-paste snoozefest that epitomises everything insipid about this album’s craft, Scream #3 is a liberal cover of that audio collage you made when you were twelve and you discovered you could record atrocious quality audio directly onto Audacity using your laptop mic, Tracks #4 and #5 are the same piece separated for air, starting off as a relatively artistically evolved swirl of modulation and guitar feedback and holding interest for approximately two minutes before devolving into a respectable emulation of a bored teenager masturbating over their first theremin, and Track #6 is good ol’ waveform fuckery with a tremolo effect that sounds legitimately cool until Poppy tries to shoehorn it into a melody, at which point everything falls apart in a vomity sea of cringe. And there you have it: six screams, one after another. Many screams. Praise the Lord. If they have screams as low-effort as this in heaven, I’ll be spending my whole afterlife with my mouth wide open (goodness knows I won’t be the only one).
The problem with, and - if you’re a particularly hardcore apologist - mitigation for
Music 2 Screm is that it isn’t really an album; it’s a marketing ploy of the same concerted wow-they-went-there pseudo-subversive variety as Asian weirdo idol groups were pedalling ten years ago, and the pot of gold at the end of its dead leprechaun dungeon is no less than a Poppy graphic novel that some real people in real rooms with real thoughts and feelings will maybe read (lol). It’s a rare case of an album that literally any member of its audience could likely surpass if they put half a shred of mind or imagination to it (please do it - if you don’t believe you can make a better noise record than Poppy, I would firmly suggest you bring this up with your therapist and double down on self-esteem). I am a fool for listening to this record, and a greater fool still for using energy from my fridge to force my fingers to type words about it into a real life corporeal laptop keyboard (!), so, uh, I guess my parting wisdom on what your expectations going into this album should be is:
don’t!
Thank you.
