On Hex Dealer, Lip Critic Let Us In On the Joke
The New York four-piece’s Partisan Records debut finds the electropunk tricksters trafficking in brilliant bullshit.
In discussions of Brooklyn-based, double-drum digital hardcore outfit Lip Critic, a standard canon of comparable artists has cropped up—MSPAINT, JPEGMAFIA, Death Grips. And while shades of all these artists emerge at various points throughout Lip Critic’s small but bombastic catalog, this band, more than anything else, feels like the latest link in a chain connecting various strains of New York rock history. The frenetic buzziness of the band’s most often-cited influence, Television, comes through, as does the bass-booming, shout-along rowdiness of the Beastie Boys. Their fondness for yelpy vocals and grimy, bassy electronic arrangements also hark back to the dance-punk of the late-Meet Me In The Bathroom days or bands like Liars or the Rapture, but way less horny. Lip Critic could potentially be lumped in with the other acts leading the alleged indie sleaze revival, but the songs on Hex Dealer seem to be primarily concerned with other forms of consumption, their over-the-top manifestations of commodity fetishism often being more perverse than sexual debauchery.
On Hex Dealer, all money is dirty money, and each act of buying and selling feeds an insatiable ego. Dead-on in their ruthless parodying, Lip Critic amp up ideals of capitalist individualism to their most over-the-top extremes, revealing the true ridiculousness of the notion that the ability to buy a new car or a designer outfit or a custom-made sandwich is the pinnacle of freedom and self-determination. Lead vocalist Bret Kaser begins “It’s The Magic”—a blown-out, descent-into-Hell of an opener—bemoaning “I thought I’d feel free in my brand new jeans” and later begs “open up your pockets and show me a thing or two.” On fan favorite “In The Wawa (Convinced I Am A God)” Kaser’s power trip descends into an ego death of sorts when he’s faced with his own alienation: “They wouldn’t give it to me / A vision of myself / So I drink the image that they sell on the shelf.” It’s this kind of thrilling, tinnitus-inducing, sensory overload that magnifies just how dense and charged a mundane interaction (or transaction) can be.
The characters that populate the songs on Hex Dealer are often these larger-than-life pastiches of already-cartoonish figures we’re well familiar with. The cult leader intoning over ominous, left-right panned sampler feedback from Kaser and Connor Kleitz, and Danny Eberle and Ilan Natter’s dark, pounding drums on “Sermon” is recognizable as any number of celebrities whose unchecked egoism gets repackaged as spiritual wisdom (one might even wonder if the “silver surfer man” mentioned could be a reference to a certain Ye interlude). As the track falls into an earsplitting, increasingly unintelligible outro, so too does its crooked protagonist. The titular “Milky Max” kicks off with distorted animal noises that bleed into a glitchy melody and, lyrically, comes off as a parody of a manosphere, “billionaire mindset”-type of guy—the kind you’ve probably seen preaching from behind a podcast mic. Our narrator—the Virgin to Milky Max’s Chad, if you will—looks us to this figure as a symbol for all the ways he himself has failed to achieve the valorized ideals of masculinity that this man embodies (“He’s that Barbie movie Ken / He seems to have all that I lack”) but eventually reveals just how flimsy and arrested these ideals are (“There he goes / On the hooves of the cattle / With a feather in his hand / Still clutching a rattle”).