The human mind is a surpassingly strange thing. It frets. It dreams. It analyzes. Depending on the factory settings of your particular model, it may engage in relentless self-criticism, or it may dance with abandon in the slipstream of pure id.
In fact, here are a few preliminary questions posed by Slope’s new album (and first for Century Media, the label perennially voted Most Likely To Be The Assistant Principal Trying To “Talk Jive” With All The Different Social Cliques) Freak Dreams to which I categorically do not have the answer:
- Why in the sock-dicked tarnation is a band in 2024 making funk metal like it’s 1989?
- Is it possible to hate something so much you love it?
- Why am I still listening to this?
- If Barack Obama were to rewrite his second book right now, is there any chance on God’s green earth he wouldn’t call it The Audacity of Slope?
- With what attitude toward one’s own shabby accomplishments and shitty attitude is it possible to emerge from an encounter with work of such wanton and gleeful arrogance as Fream Dreaks except shame, shock, and competitively eating one’s own hat?
Zen and the Art of Kread Freams, a journey in five acts
act i. considering the aforementioned socked dicks
Yes, I have certainly buried the lede already under a mountain of intolerable bullshit, but the Letter of the Day today is F, for Ffffffffffffffffffffffffffunk you. Slope, from Germany, on album, Freak Dreams, plays music, an artistic expression involving the rhythmic and harmonic variation of sound, in the style of funk/alt metal. This means that there is nothing wrong with your stereo set; they are controlling Slopemission. The sounds you are about to witness are straight from the collective playbook of such artists as the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Faith No More, Fishbone, the Beastie Boys, 311, Zebrahead, and more. They will control the horizontal. They will control the vertical. They will control the wah pedal and the slap bass and the cadence of one hundred white people hollering. You might think that it is illegal to make these sounds today but Slope is here and you cannot convince me they are not.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the [SLOPE]-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” – Dwight D Funkenhower
act ii. love and hate / get it wrong / just cut me right back down to [slope]
From the very first moment, Freak Dreams presents itself as a hateful anachronism, an aberrant rebirth of something the world has conspired studiously to ignore. This means: I hate it! Opening track “Talk Big” rolls up with the porniest wah guitar and eventually drops into an impossibly catchy chorus – can you see yourself not singing along to it under your breath? You cannot! After “It’s Tickin’” does some initial throat-clearing and settles into its main riff, there’s a bit of grungy swagger like hearing Alice in Chains’s Dirt osmotically passing through the closed window of a hotboxed school bus hurtling past you on the shoulder while you sit in traffic. It’s irritating, but can’t you taste the freedom? When is the last time you felt so miraculously unconstrained? You’re still listening. You don’t hate it. You can’t hate it.
act iii. why por qué pourquoi warum perché почему لماذا למה kwa nini 为什么 quare?
So what is that feeling? What is the visceral dislike for an expertly rendered version of an unfashionable style? Who is it that first hurt you?
♪♪ Pour some sugar ennui ♪♪
Every now and then Slope’s guitar riffing dips into Vulgar Display of Power territory, but don’t I also love that stupid album? The absurd slap bass in “True Blue” diddles itself straight into a guitar solo, and if the main riff on “Ain’t Easy” is a little stiff isn’t it also greasy as a slick of bowling alley French fries? Listening to the title track here made me think about how much time I spent listening to Incubus’s Make Yourself in high school and how much fun that was, how free it felt to belt out a good and loud song with the windows down, racing through the still summer night as if you had somewhere important to be. The fake ending on the album’s closer has a mash of excellent tumbling drums and terrible thudding guitar but it all just kinda… works? It borders on sentimental hyperbole to say that the music that is somebody’s punchline is somebody else’s lifeline, so we won’t say that here.
act iv. mister [obama] tear down this [slope]
You might turn up your nose at this music, but does that mean it is bad? In what court shall we convict someone for an admirably conceived and performed version of something people may find deeply unfashionable? For a band in the year 2024 to make music that sounds like this is just patently ridiculous, but is it ironic? When I listen to Slope I don’t hear irony, and maybe even more importantly, I don’t hear nostalgia. The problem is that I am grafting my own nostalgia onto the unknowable motives of this group of five strangers. Five strangers who, to be clear, don’t owe me or anyone else shit. It hopefully goes without saying, but the universe is hardly so well-ordered that popular=bad/unpopular=good. For those of us (hi, hello, how are you) who scuttle around the scrappy corners of ugly music where very few people like to go, it’s easy to develop a snobbish reflex, but more important to check ourselves. Sometimes people like to enjoy things that are fun, so maybe instead of trying to stop them we could pause to consider why we are not those people out there enjoying the things.
Getting back to Slope, then? This thing Skream Dreafs? It’s audacious, bodacious, loquacious – good gracious. The marble-mouth chorus on “Freak Dreams” is worth quoting at length not because it is fine poetry but because A) I cannot get it out of my head, B) it is transparently earnest, and C) there’s a little part at the end where the music drops and one of the vocalists goes: [woo!] and that warms me to my core.
“I don’t want to waste my life on some heartless shit like a 9 to 5
I don’t turn my back on all of the things I know and the streets I’m grown in
And now the pressure’s building up from all sides
Everyone’s trying to get involved and has some stupid advice
They keep on talking, we keep pushing, boy, but we never listen
That’s why the Slope gang 360 funk vision hits different
WOO”
act v. right about now / the funk [slope] brother
Watching Jacqueline Novak’s stand-up special Get On Your Knees recently, I experienced a split-second two-step of emotion. During a joke setup, she quipped about being “etherised upon a table,” and I lit up with joy at recognizing the quotation from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a favorite since those same sad-sack high school days where, omnivorously unfashionable though it may seem to those reared only on niche-curated public selves, we lapped up nu-metal and funk metal and third-wave ska and swing revival and Lilith Fair and more. Probably not more than two seconds after patting myself on the back, I burned with shame, recognizing in myself an ugly core of smug superiority, a feeling of, “Boy, look at how smart and cultured I am to spot that reference, and I bet hardly any of the regular idiots in that actual audience knows what she was talking about.”
Pretension, self-aggrandizement, elitism, superiority complexes… these are all crutches. The world is big and weird and life is long but death is longer and none of us really knows much of anything. It’s frightening to sit with your own smallness in the face of all of that.
The impossible question about any art is, “Is it good?” The gentler, truer question is, “Is it good to you?” I listen to Freak Dreams and I watch myself listening and I know that what is in flux or at-risk or conflicted or embarrassed or self-conscious is the listener. Slope is just… here. Sloping it in, Sloping it up. Rise over run, rising over running.
[woo!]
