I’ve listened to a fair amount of bad music in my day, from fiercely mediocre skinny-jeaned metalcore to the omnipresent dubstep craze (which refuses to die) or even Rebecca Black’s “Friday.”
While I’ve managed to avoid hearing most of the talent-deficient acts the music industry offers up with discouraging frequency, one band seems to have made it their personal mission to torment me with their inexplicably popular brain-dead electronica, featuring some of the most irritatingly catchy synth riffs I’ve heard in my life. As you have probably surmised by this point, I’m talking about LMFAO.
For the incredibly lucky among you who have never heard of LMFAO, they rose to their current level of popularity with the song “Party Rock Anthem” in 2011 and have maintained a vice-like grip on the Billboard Top 200 ever since. Normally, I’d be inclined to critique a more recent album, but given the fact that “Sorry for Party Rocking” still has two songs in the Billboard Hot 100 and given how astoundingly bad it is, I couldn't resist giving it a deserved thrashing.
The album starts off with the track “Rock The Beat II,” which predominantly features one of the worst elements of the band, the cherry of annoyance on their sundae of atrociousness, if you will. That would be the shrieking, repetitive, horribly mixed synth.
As a big fan of various gothic and industrial acts, I’m not always opposed to synth-based music, but the way LMFAO uses it just makes their already bad music even worse. The combination of stereotypical “wub wub wub” dubstep bits and the occasional extremely high-pitched synth lead gives one the uncanny sensation of being hit repeatedly in the head with a large blunt object. So if you don’t have a headache when you start listening to the album, expect to have one by the end.
The intro track is followed by the three most widely known songs from the album: “Sorry for Party Rocking,” “Party Rock Anthem” and “Sexy and I Know It.” It would be easy to discuss the vapid lyrics in these tracks (which seem like they were written by a high school student or some sort of troglodytic hermit whose only exposure to the outside world had been through watching recent MTV), but that would accomplish little.
Given the proclivity of most pop acts to have bad lyrics, it would seem like beating a dead horse to dock too many points from LMFAO for this particular flaw. However, “Party Rock Anthem” and “Sexy and I Know it” provide great examples of what is arguably the band’s most insufferable problem: endless repetition.
Both of these songs have a melody which is repeated over and over until they crawl under your skin and into your brain like those beetles from “The Mummy” and never leave. This problem is especially evident in “Sexy and I Know It” where the same melody is more or less repeated for the song’s entire three-minute and 15-second duration.
Did these guys not know that “The Song That Never Ends” and “The Song That Gets on Everybody’s Nerves” were meant to be irritating? Even if these were solid melodies (P.S.: they aren’t) being repeated over and over, there is practically nothing which can be redundant without becoming annoying.
While bad pop is more or less the norm nowadays and most of it can be ignored without much of an issue, certain albums are just so abrasively, mind-numbingly horrible that they manage to stand out. For any of you who, upon reading this, are considering subjecting yourself to this album the whole way through, I strongly urge you not to. It’s awful and I know it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go wash my brain out with a combination of bleach and the latest single from Massakren.
.5 Out of Five Stars
While I’ve managed to avoid hearing most of the talent-deficient acts the music industry offers up with discouraging frequency, one band seems to have made it their personal mission to torment me with their inexplicably popular brain-dead electronica, featuring some of the most irritatingly catchy synth riffs I’ve heard in my life. As you have probably surmised by this point, I’m talking about LMFAO.
For the incredibly lucky among you who have never heard of LMFAO, they rose to their current level of popularity with the song “Party Rock Anthem” in 2011 and have maintained a vice-like grip on the Billboard Top 200 ever since. Normally, I’d be inclined to critique a more recent album, but given the fact that “Sorry for Party Rocking” still has two songs in the Billboard Hot 100 and given how astoundingly bad it is, I couldn't resist giving it a deserved thrashing.
The album starts off with the track “Rock The Beat II,” which predominantly features one of the worst elements of the band, the cherry of annoyance on their sundae of atrociousness, if you will. That would be the shrieking, repetitive, horribly mixed synth.
As a big fan of various gothic and industrial acts, I’m not always opposed to synth-based music, but the way LMFAO uses it just makes their already bad music even worse. The combination of stereotypical “wub wub wub” dubstep bits and the occasional extremely high-pitched synth lead gives one the uncanny sensation of being hit repeatedly in the head with a large blunt object. So if you don’t have a headache when you start listening to the album, expect to have one by the end.
The intro track is followed by the three most widely known songs from the album: “Sorry for Party Rocking,” “Party Rock Anthem” and “Sexy and I Know It.” It would be easy to discuss the vapid lyrics in these tracks (which seem like they were written by a high school student or some sort of troglodytic hermit whose only exposure to the outside world had been through watching recent MTV), but that would accomplish little.
Given the proclivity of most pop acts to have bad lyrics, it would seem like beating a dead horse to dock too many points from LMFAO for this particular flaw. However, “Party Rock Anthem” and “Sexy and I Know it” provide great examples of what is arguably the band’s most insufferable problem: endless repetition.
Both of these songs have a melody which is repeated over and over until they crawl under your skin and into your brain like those beetles from “The Mummy” and never leave. This problem is especially evident in “Sexy and I Know It” where the same melody is more or less repeated for the song’s entire three-minute and 15-second duration.
Did these guys not know that “The Song That Never Ends” and “The Song That Gets on Everybody’s Nerves” were meant to be irritating? Even if these were solid melodies (P.S.: they aren’t) being repeated over and over, there is practically nothing which can be redundant without becoming annoying.
While bad pop is more or less the norm nowadays and most of it can be ignored without much of an issue, certain albums are just so abrasively, mind-numbingly horrible that they manage to stand out. For any of you who, upon reading this, are considering subjecting yourself to this album the whole way through, I strongly urge you not to. It’s awful and I know it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go wash my brain out with a combination of bleach and the latest single from Massakren.
.5 Out of Five Stars
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