CoSign: Lip Critic Is a Horrible, Beautiful, Wildly Entertaining Idea for a Band
The post CoSign: Lip Critic Is a Horrible, Beautiful, Wildly Entertaining Idea for a Band appeared first on Consequence.
Every month, Consequence puts the spotlight on an artist who’s poised for the big time with CoSign. For May 2024, that accolade goes to New York electro-punks Lip Critic and their bonkers new album Hex Dealer.
A few years ago, the members of Lip Critic (Danny Eberle, Connor Kleitz, Bret Kaser, and Ilan Natter) were a couple of bored college students at the State University of New York at Purchase. All musicians in some form or another, they had found themselves feeling ever so slightly unenthused about the crop of local bands. While there were plenty of passably enjoyable acts, nothing quite triggered those deep synapses hidden in ancient corners of the brain. So, they did what they had to — they absolutely fucked shit up.
“We were somewhat bored and feeling an amount of staleness to the scene of music that we were surrounded with. It just didn’t feel like there was that much to be excited about,” Kaser recalls. “There were a ton of great bands and a ton of great musicians all around us, but there was this feeling where we were all kind of, you know, like iPad-kids: dopamine deprived.”
And thus, Lip Critic was born, an outlet for the gang’s most out-there ideas, ideas that otherwise might come across as profoundly impractical or deeply misguided. These are ideas like touring with two full drum kits or developing a video game to accompany a single release. They’re the type of decisions that, if there had been a responsible adult in the room, would have been immediately shut down. You can all but hear the responses: You know that’s going to make touring way harder, right? What do you mean you’re a punk-ish band with no live guitars? Don’t you think your resources would be better spent elsewhere? To which Lip Critic would respond with a cavalcade of ear-splitting synths and samples of pigs squealing.
“Only bad ideas work,” Natter says with a laugh, referencing a DIY Facebook meme that has becomea rallying cry for Lip Critic. “Keep your good ideas away from me,” Kaser quickly adds.
You can hear those exhilarating bad ideas come to fruition on their blood-pumping new album Hex Dealer, which is a fittingly aggressive, uninhibited, and completely absurd effort. The maximalist cacophony of the album’s 12 tracks falls somewhere in between Death Grips and Nine Inch Nails, Autechre and Rage Against the Machine, Burial and smashing your head against the wall.
Opener “It’s the Magic” welcomes newcomers into Lip Critics’ world with distorted 808s and Kaser’s drawn-out, near-slurred vocals before the dueling drums kick in to fully demolish any sense of stability the listener might have been clinging on to. Singles “Milky Max” and “In the Wawa (Convinced I Am a God)” are similarly unhinged, while also boasting some genuinely sticky hooks — the band just decided to deep fry said hooks before serving them up. Throw in samples, which were likely recorded via the voice messages app on Kaser’s phone, and cryptic, humorous lyrics, and you have the makings of Lip Critic tune.
“[It’s] like if you gave George Washington a Ring Pop, he’d have an aneurysm,” Kaser explains with a mischievous grin. “This is the equivalent. It’s like, show this to everyone who made Abbey Road, and they’d be like, ‘This is disgusting, dude.'”
Such a sonic storm is the result of two primary forces that lie at the heart of Lip Critic: the more esoteric and in-your-face sect of EDM and sweaty, underground hardcore punk. Typically, Kleitz and Kaser claim the former camp while Eberle and Natter come from the latter. Of course, the lines aren’t as strictly drawn as that description suggests; Eberle and Natter can bust a move and Kleitz and Kaser can more than rock out. As the band tells it, the more they swap artist recommendations and work on new material, the more similarities they find between the two seemingly distinct genres.
“Danny and I may have come from more of a rock background, but Connor was playing bass in bands too, and Brett was playing drums,” Netter points out.
“They’re just very kindred [styles of music],” Kaser continues. “Like, the stuff that Connor and I really bonded over was sort of industrial, harder techno stuff. Deconstructed club and stuff like that is so informed by stuff like hardcore and metal. It does feel like a lot of the time, if you like one and you don’t like the other, you probably just haven’t found your flavor yet of the other, ’cause they’re so intertwined.”
The fusion of those two worlds extends into the band’s live act, which is as high-energy as any punk show and meticulously crafted as a DJ set. With no breaks between songs, at least one mid-song instrument switch, and a stage plot that’s solely made up of a pair of drum kits and a pair of samplers, a Lip Critic show is bound to have clubbers two-stepping and hardcore kids tapping into their inner raver.
Partly because of the limitations of having just four sets of hands to perform their tracks, and partly because the members of Lip Critic are too restless to leave anything dormant, their live sets often feature altered versions of their recordings. Sometimes the alterations are subtle, while other times they’re adding half-time breakdowns or redesigning the beat from the ground up.
“The idea of remixing stuff and remix culture just feels very natural to do. So, whenever we have a song that we’ve recorded and start working on it live, we always kind of think of it as a remix process,” Kaser explains. “I also feel like the eclecticness of it is a big factor as well. Like, for DJ sets, you hear music from all over the world, you hear different genres back to back. It doesn’t feel like just because we’re a band that we should not do that.”
As Kaser and Netter talk about their performance philosophies, they throw out names like Deerhoof, Death Grips, Slipknot, and even Andy Kaufman as inspirations. On paper, it seems like a random group of weirdos. In-person, though, it somehow all makes sense.
Which, as a sentiment, describes Lip Critic as a whole. The math shouldn’t add up. The mix of influences, the makeup of the band, the extra-musical interests — these should all combine into a muddy brown. Instead, they’ve stumbled across a new color altogether, one that’s more fun and more entertaining than most shades that came before it.
It might go against logic, but that’s kind of the point. “I would say if anybody wants to start a band that sounds like a horrible idea,” Kaser triumphantly states, “that’s probably a good idea.”
CoSign: Lip Critic Is a Horrible, Beautiful, Wildly Entertaining Idea for a Band
Jonah Krueger
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