Growing up during the dawn of the early Internet (the flash animation, pre-meme kind) was quite something with regard to discovering music. MTV-style video-focused programming and radio play merged with new platforms that chose to promote the weird and wonderful (My Hands Are Bananas), and gave us instant viral culture shocks like Baauer’s Harlem Shake or LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem. Those examples interestingly showed the Internet’s main contribution to mass-marketed monoculture, the billions-of-view YouTube giants that felt a world away from the niche forum dwellers that chose to turf out hidden musical gems in the web’s crevices.
There were crossovers though: Odd Future’s overnight fame after Tyler, the Creator’s Yonkers video, and the promotion of Death Grips’ Ex-Military or The Money Store, to ears that would likely never hear these rambunctious rap-punk movements. New York’s Lip Critic were no doubt part of this listening generation, and have turned their ingrained influences inside-out to become an in-your-face bombastic display of danceable freakout hardcore. Frequent lines are drawn between this hyped foursome and Death Grips, but certainly that trio in their prime: Zach Hill-powered drums, samples from the highest and lowest forms of culture and, most memorably, MC Ride’s strange yet quotable call outs.
Sure, Connor Kleitz’s sample-pounding and the scattergun drum duo of Ilan Natter and Daniel Eberle does evoke the speedy rhythms and admirable nonsense of the Sacramento troupe, but they refresh that wonderful feeling of ‘what the bloody hell is this?’. Dipping close to post-punk bravado on their first single Entry Level Stud, Lip Critic have been upping the ante the past few years finalising in this first major label release, and have not held back even slightly on the bewilderment that’s made their name worth chatting about. Influences from Talking Heads, Green Day, Chief Keef, and Lightning Bolt’s rabid hero Brian Chippendale all make for a potent musical cocktail on Hex Dealer, also showcasing vocalist Bret Kaser living up to the Paste’s description of the band as “the B-52s on ketamine”.
Starting life as a band making songs about the lack of milkmen in the modern age, the swirl of ferocious double drums, sirens and noise surrounds Kaser’s cryptic tales. He’s a Damien on the intense Melt-Banana like cut The Heart—“all that time I waited / just to find out I’m from hell”—and Love Will Redeem You feels like being high and traversing a glitched world of internet cables, self-referentially talking about “51 phone lines” and “my HDMI leads to the heaven’s buttons”. Lyrical analysis feels aimless here, especially with Milky Max’s narrative discussing jealous revenge against a man with the charisma of Ryan Gosling playing Ken in Barbie. More straightforward (somehow) is meat-based song Bork Pelly, and My Wife and the Goblin is actually about someone’s partner being chatted up by a goblin, complete with a hard to hear “damn, that goblin’s handsome” line. If you can imagine references to mailmen, vampires, jesters, pigs and the titular goblin occurring in a two minute space, fair play to you, and this band actually did it.
There’s plenty more memorable shoutouts to give across this half-hour barnstormer: all of Natter and Eberle’s once punk-fuelled, once beat-heavy switchups that underline Kleitz’s soundboard (in particular the explosive bass drops and skittery strobe-synths on I’m Alive, with its hard as fuck beat in the second half), traded rapper verses with Philly’s emo-trap duo GHÖSH (who featured greatly on the latest HIRS Collective record) and the most catchy use of the phrase “fuck that selfish man” you’re likely to ever hear. Once you’re familiar with the base sound of Lip Critic—pure adrenaline through head-spinning electronics – then it’s up to you whether you take the plunge into this full effort. It’s dizzying, humorous, and a must-listen for fans of inspired dance and punk fusions.
For those less inclined, it may be too much. But with Hex Dealer having been released since the band has been able to hit the road, it’s certainly an outstanding lesson in translating a frantic live show into a packaged product, which back in our day would’ve been a group of mp3s traded on Limewire. What times they were, and what times probably lie ahead for this excellent energy ball of an act.
For fans of: Death Grips, MS Paint, Show Me the Body
‘Hex Dealer’ by Lip Critic is released on 17th May on Partisan Records.
Words by Elliot Burr
