Venetian Snares - My So-Called Life (2010)

Review: Venetian Snares - My So-Called Life (2010, Timesig/Planet Mu)

 

Venetian Snares has made a bunch of albums that changed the whole IDM genre upon their releases, but My So-Called Life more closely resembles 2002's VSNARES 237 0894, a scattered collection of mutually irrelevant oddities thrown together as if on a compilation. The chief difference is that My So-Called Life contains entirely choice cuts: "Goodbye9/Hello10" and the emotional closing title track could easily have hailed from 2007's My Downfall, "Ultraviolent Junglist" puts a Detrimentalist spin on Chocolate Wheelchair's hardest tracks and Filth's trance-inspired drum rhythms make numerous subtle appearances. It's as though the breakbeat wizard left a highlight or two off each recent release just to drop them all on one album, but that's not the case - Funk allegedly recorded everything here recently, in focused sessions of one or two days per track. The LP's sheer stylistic variety proves a testament to Venetian Snares' versatility and overrides any immature potty jokes, which serve as middle fingers for those who can't get past them enough to instead dwell on his talent. For instance, hilarious highlights "Who Wants Cake?" and "Welfare Wednesday" showcase sped-up rave samples respectively singing "I feel so mentally retarded" and "Anal intercourse in your punani" as refrains ("Chef Boyardee," "Mike Paradinas" and "Selling crystal meth" also make Aaron's obscene list of peculiar punani happenings), and autobiographical satire "Aaron2" sounds at once more lighthearded and sinister than its melancholic, Autechre-indebted predecessor, telling the story of malevolent third parties taking the composer's happiness in exchange for his first drum. Silly humor aside, the greatest songs easily make Funk's best-of canon, and the rest is enjoyable at worst - compilation or not, My So-Called Life is a hell of a lot of fun, and at a point in his career where he's literally done everything, it's exactly the kind of recording Funk needed to make.

Bump this: Posers and Camera Phones, Welfare Wednesday, My So-Called Life