VICE Album Reviews, September 18: 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks, Cara Delevingne, and More

Music journalism is going to the wall, and places for sensible, well-informed, nuanced takes on the latest releases are dwindling. So we thought we might as well put the final nail in the coffin.

Read this month’s album reviews here, here and here.

300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks
THIS IS SPA TOWN!
XL Recordings
I can only apologize for my role in popularizing “UK Poo,” a term that has but should absolutely not be applied to this new collaboration between 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks. Admittedly, lead single “The Ballad of St Nick’s Park” has many of the microgenre’s key features: absurdity, naive charm, and a music video featuring shirtless kids necking Courvoisier and sour candy outside a mini-supermarket. With screamo vocals, 8-bit keyboards, and speed garage wobble bass, the project lays a pipe from the noughties dancefloor hysterics of Test Icicles, Klaxons, and Hadouken! through to contemporary jerk and hyperpop. So I think it would be far more appropriate to call it Poo Rave.

This record blazes, brief and exhilarating, with a suburban blend of teenage bedroom music and underage party anthems. The project was inspired by DIY emo artist 300Skulls’ abruptly moving back in with his parents, and going down to London most weekends to work on songs with bassline producer Jenny Sparks. The resulting music, according to amateur YouTube musicologists, “captures the era when the chavs, emos, skaters and middle class kids all chilled at the same park with the skate ramp… all brought together by weed and booze.” And listening to THIS IS SPA TOWN!, I had the uncanny sensation that brain cells I thoroughly fried in the mid-2000s were slowly struggling to fire back to life.

In fact, this all feels a little like one of those videos I keep getting served, showing what it would be like to be 96-years-old after dementia has taken everything but the ad-libs from the record collection of your youth. For a millennial, the sense of familiarity is so strong it’s as if the kind nurses have put something on to make you feel as comfortable as possible while you expire. As per my family’s wishes, they’re letting me wear a glow stick around my wrist instead of a hospital tag. And when I start giving the gun fingers like the wobble bass just kicked in at a warehouse party in 2008, they’ll know that it’s time to send me off to the great, never ending afters.

8/10
GERARD BUTTHEAD

Adult DVD
Adult DVD
Fat Possum
In a desperate attempt to curb this all-consuming internet porn addiction, I tried to restrict myself to physical media, so any time I feel the call to goon, I have to scuttle to the den, boot up my old PlayStation 2, and pop a porno film into the disc drive. The only problem is that, while looking to purchase an adult DVD (Cougar Feeding Time Vol. 4, if you must know), I ended up coming across the band Adult DVD and their new album, Adult DVD. I’ve spent the last 13 hours in the company of this pulsating, irreverent debut, and I’m no closer to being satisfied. So there you go. Not my proudest review, this one.

6/10
MIRTHMASTERR

Protomartyr 
Hotel Usona
Domino
I booked to come here for a romantic weekend but, on arrival, realized we were actually staying in an elaborate post-punk concept album about a haunted hotel that is, in fact, a metaphor for the dark and disgusting state of American life. Well, it was certainly atmospheric. This weird moaning kept coming through the walls, and someone started playing the trumpet in the middle of the night. Anyway, the person I was with—a shy and retiring type—didn’t like it at all and soon fled back to the wife and family (I’m still trying to get the money I was promised) and I was left to take all this GHB and amyl nitrite on my own. After that, I started to really quite enjoy my stay. The breakfast buffet left a little to be desired, though.

7/10 
IGGY PNP

Cara Delevingne
Not Normal
Warner Records
It’s hard being a beautiful member of the aristocracy. After leaving a prestigious private boarding school to start her successful modeling career, Cara Delevingne has tried to diversify by acting in music videos, TV shows, and films; publishing young-adult literature; designing fashion collections; and launching a line of vegan prosecco. I don’t know if her music career will be any more successful than these other ventures, but Not Normal is a satisfyingly obtuse record that, at the very least, will continue to frustrate and confuse the many industry types who’ve been trying so hard to market her this entire time.

6/10
FI DOLLA APPLE $TORE

Julia Jacklin
The Gem
AD93
I tried to live the second-hand dream in Julia Jacklin’s wistful rustic songs: moving somewhere new, stumbling upon a backstreet bar, hanging out there until the city started to feel like home, and recording an album in little a room upstairs. But the landlady’s called in the police, and they’re treating it like a “hostage-taking situation.” The officer with the loudspeaker has been ruining all my vocal takes, but he’s gone quiet now. Actually, I’m over by the window, and it looks like they’ve all been told to stand down. Maybe there’s still someone on the roof over there, but never mind him, it’s time to get in the booth! I just need to fetch the lyric book from my inside breast pocket, just let me reach for it and—

7/10
FATTY HEARST

M83
I Wrote You A Letter
Other Suns
What if the guy from M83 knew that his commercial success would die off after Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, so he tried to manifest his visage on the astral plane and become a Force ghost, but unfortunately he failed and accidentally ended up trapped in all the car adverts and reality TV montages that used “Midnight City” throughout the 2010s. By returning to the immediacy of his earliest bedroom recordings for this graceful new record, Anthony Gonzalez may have gone some of the way to freeing his own ghost from the machine. And if this works for him, then perhaps something similar could help for the other lost souls who’ve had their immortal selves uploaded into generative AI.

6/10
CARY D. FLAME

Soft Cell
Danceteria
Republic of Music
It’s been 45 years since Soft Cell’s debut record, and, sadly, the Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret shows no real sign of abating. The visionary synth duo’s seedy prophecy has come to pass: we’re now trapped in a venture-sexual, 24-hour peep show, and no one ever pops in to wipe the one-way mirror clean. So, as we gyrate sadly toward oblivion, here’s one final record from Marc Almond and Dave Ball (who died shortly after it was completed). But if you squint a little through the murk and haze, it almost looks like this cam girl has a full face of burlesque makeup, and we might yet tug ourselves into a better world.

4/10
LOSER MINNELLI

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