MSPaint are that rare band who can make my head feel as if it is absolutely spinning on its axis and about to roll off and get wedged under the couch. The way they knock me around really loosens some screws. Like I've been sucked into some never-aired episode of the Twilight Zone where men's consciousnesses are transported into the plastic molds of a rock 'n sock em robot game- putting me in the unfortunate position of having my spin jump out past my collarbone before I've even realized the bell has rung due to a well-timed, fatal jab. It's a clean knock out and I can't fault the band for taking the shot. In fact, their direct and uncompromising attack is one of the aspects that I've come to hold most dear about MSPaint.
The Mississippi quartet released their self-titled EP/Demo last year and it's definitely taken that long for me to cut through my awe of them in order to say something constructive about their music. They represent a potent combination of elements whose combined impact I don't take lightly- and you shouldn't either. MSPaint is like a rave in an empty mall that explodes into a riot, a conflagration that only gains momentum as it spills out into the street like a flaming, glowsticks fluid bleeding, neon-blitzed steamroller. A machine that, in a distempered rampage and infamous bacchanal, ends up leveling city hall.
You have to love a punk band who knows their way around electronics and is able to make them gel with live instruments to unleash the explosive potential of both- like a gasoline bomb hitting a police barricade. MSPaint has a capacity for crossover success due in part to their embrace of electronic music, as well as a serendipitous collision of hip hop and hardcore. Leading with chillingly reserved and corroded jungle electronics and slightly fractured darkwave synths and allowing the biting frost of these elements to set the baseline temperature and tone of their sound is an inspired aesthetic choice and one that gives the entire album a kind of guerilla drum 'n bass feel. Further, the forward electronics cultivate a moisture sapping quality within the mix, like the songs were recorded and produced in a meatlocker, a fact that has a much-needed regulatory effect on the vocals when they come roaring in.
The vocal work is the second most distinctive quality of MSPaint's sound- a shit-stirring alliance of masticating raps flows and languid sardonic snears. The singer's performance has a conspicuous, almost apocalyptical character to it, motivated to push through the strain of its affect out of a cold alloy fusion of zealotry and bitter frustration. The singer often sounds like MC Ride, slipping in and out of his flow while tripping on some cosmic space dust-lined PCP and channeling pocket universe manifestations of Wesley Eisold and Ian Shelton. This might sound ridiculous, but it's also not a scenario you'd want to mess around with if you're looking to keep all the cartilage in your nose from collapsing on contact with someone's knuckles. MSPaint has a message they intend to get across and how ever they need to get your attention long enough to fire it down your ear canal is what they are going to do.
MSPaint is a band who have an uneasy relationship with the legacy of racial segregation and economic inequality which persists in their home state (and the nation at large), and they're of the mind that the culture either needs to mend its ways or be burnt to the ground- there can be no other ultimatum. You can feel their anger pulsing through songs like "Confidence (Consciousness)" with its screaming kettle sonics, chilled dagger synth lines, and heavy-hearted saturnine tromp. In contrast, "Flush" reflects a column of optimism that runs through the backbone of their sound and philosophy, describing the permeation of two minds with each other's psychic rays, and the process of bringing them to a common understanding of each other amongst a roil of ice-shard shaped notes and bulky rhythms lubricated with sweat and determination. This dichotomy of anguish and aspiration also manifests in the bookends of the album on the opening and closing tracks, with the former "Hardwired," exhibiting a torquing vocal melody that courts a dalliance with a hypnotic alkaline of blood-stained, night-club crashing rhythms to draft a misanthropic manifesto on human ignorance, while "Post-American" describes the end of the world as a clearing of the slate upon which we can write the next (and hopefully better!) chapter of our history, bathed in the balm and scrub of a radioactive new agey feedback and fall out, and heralded by the triumphant proclamation, "burn all the flag and the symbols of man." Like I said, this is their optimistic side speaking. Sometimes the only shower that can get you clean is one made of fire.
