Opening track I’ll Get Better B4 It Gets Worse is a chundering rocker with MYSELF’s peculiar, almost Weird Al-esque anunication repeating the track title over a solid, generic tune. There’s a certain obnoxiousness to his delivery, that becomes even more apparent on the following song She Rocks… with its scattershot hi-speed lyrics rattled off over an energetic rock background. It’s got tempo, but little else, despite the scratchy record samples that bookend the track there’s something polished and clean to these songs that keep them on the wrong side of rock and roll.
Slightly more appealing is the Calypso-rhythms of Do the Zombie Walk, though lyrically it’s in Black Lace territory providing the listener with instructions on how to do the titular move before repeating the track title with as much gusto as its namesake clamouring for “Brains.”
The grinding grumbly guitars of the Prince-gets-heavy styled Saint//\Sinner works better, sure it’s a pretty standard pop-rock song with a sing-a-long-able chorus that forms 70% of the track’s running time to ensure that you’ll know all the words by the end, but it’s a decent, slightly Aerosmith-esque type slab of posturing nonsense. The nods to the purple sporting elfin one continue on Paisley Babylon, but despite some fruity organ the track lacks the raggedy energy that makes even the limpest of Prince cuts sound, at least, alive, here the funk-outs wander closer to Santana territory.
Needless 2 Say is a bitch about bad artist management and accountancy, ‘How can you trust each and everybody/When a certain somebody is stealing all your money.’ It’s an insipid and lacklustre tune that bops along mindlessly until it fades out, and if there’s one thing that’ll make a bad song worse it’s a fade out. Reality TV fares better if only because it concerns itself, generally, with its multiple layers of guitar noodling, whilst MYSELF himself makes cookie-cutter remarks in the middle.
Things get off to a good start on Fortune Teller, for once the arrogance of MYSELF’s pop-culture referencing lyrics work to his favour, spat out with a sneer, over rising, twitchy guitars and bleepy retro-futuristic ambience. It does wind down about a minute before it finishes, the last 60 seconds a seemingly never-ending repetition of the line ‘You can be my fortune teller, baby/It’s now or never’ whilst the guitars do some, albeit nice, twangly eighties-style sounds.
There’s diet punk on I’m With STUP!D!, So Act Retarded, which might feel more frenzied and unhinged if it didn’t drag on for just shy of four minutes. Elsewhere Wick’d has a soundtrack of police sirens running alongside MYSELF’s snotty drawl, singing ‘Turn your vibrator off/Don’t mean to turn you on/Well actually I do/That’s the premise of this song.’ It’s no Darling Nikki, that’s for sure.
Ironically MYSELF sings ‘All good things must come to an end’ on the record’s penultimate track Good Things Come To Those That Hate, lolloping drums and surfy guitars shuffling about in the background as he sings the same lyric for the hundreth time, making the listener wonder when, oh when, will the song match his sentiment. Of course, even when it does finally finish there’s still one more track of the album to go, and it’s Fxxx You, a five and a half minute pop-rock ditty that outstays its welcome less than half way through its running time.
Occasionally a musical idea creeps out of the flat-pack, and once in a while MYSELF manages to splutter out a decent lyric, but for the most part each and every track on this record consists of a lacklustre arrangment to which he can repeat the title until its drilled into your brain. Fortunately, once the record’s over everything that’s been panel beaten into your skull has fallen out the other side and been forgotten. It’s nice to see an artist embracing an egotistical swagger in a deliberately ‘old school’ style, but whereas some arrogance is oddly supported by evidence, here, at least, there’s very little to warm you to the ego on display.
[Rating:1]
