#418 Skrillex - My Name is Skrillex

I keep hearing this name. Apparently this guy is so popular the guys on BBC news bothered to take some "that's not music" sniffing disses at him, and it seems like everyone that likes dubstep, electronic music, or good music of any kind has deemed him a scourge. Anyone who manages to garner disdain from two such different circles of elitists has at least piqued my curiosity.

3 phases: I put this on a bit after listening to the Feed Me album, and after a first listen, it had basically passed cornlike through my brainbowels. I had no impression of it other than that it went "SQUOOONK" a bunch of times.

So I put on a second listen and really payed attention. I like squonky textured noises, I often like obnoxiousness (Dan Deacon, Spank Rock, Girl Talk, Muscles and Fuck Buttons all have passing overlap with this stuff), I like unpredictable structures like the ones features on the album's opener.

During listen 2, track 2-4 I had a growing impression. This guy truly is fucking terrible*. Look, I tried to give it a fair chance (see above), but this is unlistenable, artless, uninteresting, undancable, with no real sense of texture, movement or flow. Feed Me, Girl Talk and Fuck Buttons are masters of controlling a flow**, understanding where you're at, where you might like to go, how to get you there, in terms of tempo, emotion, mood, and essential heartbeat manipulation. Dan Deacon and Fuck Buttons know how to craft sounds over time to make rich hypnotic spaces. Muscles and Girl Talk know how to be a lot of goddamned fun, to make noise, but noise that is fun to listen to.

Skrillex has none of that. It is pop beyond pop, not even bothering to craft a chorus, or an entire hook, to repeat, simply finding 2 noises that go "SQUOOONK", and hitting a key that triggers them over and over and over again. And over and over and over again. There's no build, no cooldown, no change, no evolution, no journey. Just the same noise again and again and again, scarcely a change in dynamics or tempo, and those that do arrive do so seemingly at random, with no sense for when those kinds of changes are needed. Its like watching a badly dubbed version of a badly edited movie, where none of the subtly needed details are there. Its the Phantom Menace of dance albums. Even the bits that are decent (the insistent pulse of Do Da Oliphant) are beaten so badly to death and then horse-beaten further still that any Fruit Stripe rush you had is fast lost. It makes Lil Jon's Yeah look like Supper's Ready.

I also have no idea how this is being called dubstep other than the fact that every once in a while the noises stutter, but this is as dubstep as Tonight Tonight was classical. The opener has its moments, but the rest is uninteresting if you don't listen and annoying if you do. Pass 1.5/5

You might like this if: you like huge maximalist techno, want some squonky swerves, and don't mind getting really severely pummeled by the endless repetition of a single synth stab

* Edit March 5th: I really should have said this album is terrible. Here's my arc with what I think of Skrillex as a guy:
- 1) listen: to this album: this guy sure makes tooly music.
- 2) see: pictures of him: wow, this guy looks like a complete tool.
- 3) read: a rolling stone article about him: he actually seems like a pretty earnest, decent guy, and this was apparently his first record outside of his screamo background. So that's impressive, considering. Still don't like the album though.

** Edit December 21st: I found the perfect point of contrast: listen to the first two minutes of Feed Me's Grand Theft Ecstacy, especially that ever-hitched kick in at 1:30 or so, the restrained way that it works with and subverts the archetypical buildup, the dizzying, sickening way the bass interacts with the high synth line. There's repetition, but the parts are in balance and used to compose something affecting. That's how its done, my friends.