Lip Critic - Hex Dealer Review
Electropunks Lip Critic crush dense, aural collages of combative hardcore and hazardous breakbeat into an enthralling, confounding mess.
New York electropunk misfits Lip Critic's very conception was born from mishap and blunder. When half of their predecessor outfit Chalklit hadn't shown up for a gig back in 2018, band acquaintance Bret Kaser stepped in and spat a series of free-form, lyrical improv, unwittingly pointing to new creative ventures sparked from a moment of chaotic spontaneity. This ephemeral urgency characterised subsequent EPs Kill Lip Critic and Lip Critic II, two noisy blasts of glitched-out hardcore twisted with breakbeat belligerence that captured the volatility of their acclaimed live sets.
Abrasive precarity and the notion that something could go wrong at any minute has been acutely channelled on debut LP Hex Dealer. Bellowing a caustic volley of dense, aural collages amid Kaser's nasal vocal commands, Lip Critic scores the queasy juxtaposition of consumerist gratification and spiritual isolation with a vice-like grip, mirroring the busy cacophony of the corporatised contemporary by simultaneously rejecting categorisation yet carnivorously shoving a myriad of genres across punk, electro, industrial, and hip hop into their sonic maw.
Each of Hex Dealer's tracks feels like several other tunes genetically spliced together in some horrible lab experiment. 'Spirit Bomber' jerks and wriggles with frenzied bombast like Death Grips abusing Crash Bandicoot's sound font, corroded livestock clash with dual-drummers Danny Eberle and Ilan Natter's big-beat muscle on the greasy raver 'Milky Max', and 'Love Will Redeem You' fuses upside-down gabba with musique-concrete, found-sound detritus. These elemental melees that characterise each track capture the record's pugilistic mirth, forever balancing combative threat with skewed humour.
Kaser maintains a breathless pace fronting Connor Kleitz's frenetic electronics. Veering between bratty Beastie Boys snot, mordant incantations, and heavy-metal growl, Kaser similarly gives voice to the disparate montage of sounds he's fronting. "Now I speak with the birds of prey, split tongue, dopamine, adrenaline pumping up the heart, the heart, the heart" yelps Kaser on the discordant 'The Heart, dialling the lyrical potency between multitudinous stream-of-conscious and terse, DAF style repetitive mantras, always exploring the band's thematic concerns with the body and its primordial detach from society.
The accidental calamity that forged Lip Critic's founding and informed their early material hangs all over Hex Dealer with greater hazardous energy. A gripping and arresting cornucopia of punk snarl, no-wave dance, and colourful disquiet, Lip Critic has delivered an explosively confident debut LP which manages to crush and wield its vast arsenal of sounds and flavours into a confounding, enthralling whole.