Geordie Greep: The New Sound Album Evaluate

This man is aware of he shouldn’t say the phrase “pussy.” The protagonist of Geordie Greep’s “Holy, Holy” has simply spent two minutes yapping at a girl about his sexual popularity—how well-known he’s among the many Japanese and French Guyanese, how he’s like a god to the “jihadis” and “revolutionaries”—when he stumbles right into a wildly distasteful pickup line. “I’ll wager your pussy is holy, too,” he says, chomping down on the phrase prefer it’s a cocktail straw between rear molars. He doesn’t need to say it, you possibly can inform, however he can’t assist himself, torn as he’s between good manners and a crippling horniness that may solely come from being profoundly lonely.

That strained “pussy” is the linchpin of The New Sound, the previous black midi frontman’s debut solo file. That is an album filled with dudes who’re beset by a distress they will’t talk, one which forces them into saying and doing issues they know they most likely shouldn’t. Throughout its 62 minutes, males in bars and nightclubs and boardrooms appear nearly as in the event that they’re competing to see who can abase themselves the furthest. These males aren’t gigachads or alphas on the hunt, although most of them aspire to each. They’re, to a person, ridiculous. “I might’ve disemboweled myself simply to carry your hand,” one declares, whereas one other, infected by a intercourse employee with faculty aspirations, insists that he’s curious “to see what you consider Proust.” They’re failures on their very own phrases—seldom do they appear to efficiently mattress a girl, even once they’re making an attempt to pay for intercourse—which makes their failures of ethics and good style even starker.

Relying in your appreciation of over-the-top style exercises à la Frank Zappa and Mr. Bungle, it’s both a deft creative gambit or simply scrumptious irony that these unsubtle, simply hateable characters are the point of interest of unsubtle music that usually dangers being extremely annoying. As a satirist, Greep shares an absurdist humanism and love of basic songwriting with Randy Newman (although it’s troublesome to image the latter singing a line like “You possibly can cum greater than 100 stallions”), however he lets each play out as minor parts inside a turbulent, mile-a-minute model. Throughout The New Sound, his characters chatter their manner by a pub mixture of uneven salsa, mid-century showtunes, clean jazz, Isley Brothers guitar disco, big-budget samba, and a dozen different kinds you can think about the characters in a Steely Dan tune listening to (together with the music of Steely Dan).