I try to avoid writing about critical response instead of writing about the song itself, but this is only the second Skrillex song I’ve heard, so given the amount of discussion around this dude, this was all I could do. Conclusion (tentative): We need a better Skrillex and Skrillex needs better criticism.
Relevant (and not noticed until I posted my own response).
It seems we are arguing about Skrillex again!!
This Doors “collaboration” is the worst thing on Skrillex’s new EP, which is otherwise entertaining but wheel-spinning. My two weeks’ investigation and application of my trained rockcrit brain suggests that the guy’s best track remains “Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites”, which really IS great but is over a year old now (and he’s done a bunch of stuff using the same tricks since - NB he would not be the first electronic musician to make samey-sounding records, shock horror.
Why is “Scary Monsters” good? It has the thing I casually identified on Twitter as missing from the sound - that peaking bittersweetness which is the signature emotion of almost all vulgar rave and dance music (hardcore, happy hardcore, trance, etc), provided by the cut-up glossolalic vocal sample. For something so identified w/”bros” those parts sound really un-macho to me, its particular rushiness is closer to handbag house than anything else I’ve heard that gets called ‘dubstep’.
And then obviously there’s the way that stuff contrasts w/the drops, which pull off the trick of coming a tiny bit before you’re expecting them, and which are really JOYFUL and kinetic and gorgeously blocky - this is what I was thinking when I was comparing them to Kirby monsters, the way the story stops for these BEASTS to rampage through a scene before being driven off. (The word “Sprites” is a giveaway too - definite shades here of the too-big-for-the-screen bosses you’d get in old videogrames, which were going for a similar flood-your-inputs effect: the tracks lose resolution when the drops come in, like a FPS enemy rushing you until the screen becomes a cloud of fat pixels)
So yes blissiness+bass drops is hardly a new formula but there’s a vigour in “Scary Monsters” which really speaks to me and becomes diluted through repetition in his other stuff (though not to the point where I dislike much of it) (well maybe the Doors bit).
Nate is basically right that the “hurrah Skrillex has not ruined dubstep he’s saved it” angle is troll-y and hugely annoying for dubstep fans, though it’s a backlash to a backlash - the trolls are gleefully jumping in because there’s already snootiness and hand-wringing going on (they/we are drawn to that stuff). Anyway the thrills I get from “Scary Monsters” are basically very different from those I might get from anything called dubstep (I am CITED in the Wikipedia article on dubstep, I did an actual LOL) - I went back and listened to Skream’s “Midnight Request Line” to hear some unequivocally REAL ACTUAL CLASSIC DUBSTEP and yes of course I can see why people would like that and not “Scary Monsters”, even if I am pretty sure which one is better*.
*I get that one is probably designed for mass club use and one is not but I’m listening to them both in the same circs so they seem more comparable to me.
(Source: thesinglesjukebox)
