CD Reviews

Bomb the Music Industry! | Scrambles

Quote Unquote/Asian Man (2009)

By BARRY THOMPSON | March 23, 2009

2.5 Stars

To Leave or Die in Long Island (2005) and Goodbye Cool World (2006) cemented this outfit's legacy as a band-type thing too self-consciously goofy to be taken seriously, but in five years BTMI! will be a major influence as their fans come of age and start their own bands.

Main dude Jeff Rosenstock outsmarted those conspiring to steal his ADD-friendly smorgasbord of countercultural musical idiosyncrasies by giving the entire BTMI! catalogue away for a suggested donation at quoteunquoterecords.com. Although hardly BTMI!'s best work, Scrambles is surely worth the 30 seconds it takes to download. Rosenstock's greatest songwriting asset is a sort of hyper-irony that's so snarky it's heartfelt.

He's pulled off scathing social commentary before — "Side Projects Are Never Successful" from Goodbye, for example — but the affecting bits off Scrambles are concerned with average shades of angst. "It Shits!" is about how working sucks. "25!" chronicles a quarter-life crisis. "Sort of Like Being Pumped" recounts the most mundane thing of all: a fucking sunset. Meanwhile, the big-picture songs feel redundant. "9/11 Fever!!!" would've been topical six years ago. "(Shut) Up the Punx!!!" is a tirade against narrow-minded, self-congratulatory punk-rockers. Lampooning a segment of the population who are assholes by definition amounts to shooting fish in a barrel . . . with a bazooka. Fun, but unfulfilling.

Topics: CD Reviews , Entertainment, Music, Swearing and Invective, More

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