The Good: May 2016 has been a month filled with albums arriving from the industry’s best artists. While these albums magnify that our current musical landscape is very much varied, all of these albums share the same focus on getting lost. While James Blake and Radiohead focused on using electric keyboards and distinctive vocals to create gentle otherworlds for listeners to feel isolated in sunlight and moonlight, Death Grips use an opposite approach of using loud combinations of thrash punk, metal, rap, and electronic genres to make the listener incapable of having time to stop, think, and find their own. Although listeners can always know what to expect from a Death Grips’ album, their distinctive ruckus is so iconic and unusual there is always an intrigue to discovering their new material.
At the same time, the band places catchy choruses into their songs to create some organization to the madness. This can be found on “Giving Bad People Good Ideas”. The trick to the band’s music is that so much occurs so quickly that a listener realises the LP is finished before it has even begun. Here and there in the first listen the little pauses from insanity come in the form of chorus or breakdowns, each capable of making the listener feel like a boss. While at first the only two songs that really feel accessible are “Trash” and “Ring a Bell”, the album, like all Death Grip productions has a quality that always pushes a listener to return to make sense of everything happening in the music.
The Bad: For people who love different music this band is a leader in the modern scene. For those who aren’t too interested in experimentation, this album can feel like just a guy yelling with no sense.
Would I Listen Again: Definitely
First Herd 