There is a lot to admire about MIDI Bunny's expansive and somewhat laboriously titled MIDI Bunny LP or, "Songs to Hurt Others," but one thing in particular that tickles my pickle is that MIDI Bunny's LP is not an album at all but is instead described as a novel- That's right, a novel. A novel with a jaunty piano riff intro accompanied by a disquisition on dying for your art, which concludes with a skit about how skits are cringe... This is some Max Bemis-level narrative twisting, my dude- an implosion of expectations and blenderized genre etiquette that drives the subjective into the fabric of the real at such a fine point that they invert at the point of impact. A book that your eyes can't read but have to feel instead, like the pen-scrawled indentations in an old composition notebook, or a fresh panoply of singing photographs that you hear with your heart before they congeal into coherent scenes. Looking at the album through a literary lens lends the sprawling 23-chapter work a tether of cogent lucidity as a sort of post-modern inversion of tropes separated into narrative beats by branching musically divergent styles that when taken together, form a cohesive romance with a winding meta-logical that buttresses the chronicle and keeps it on the rails. Songs to Hurt Others is sort of like a gorilla opera rendition of a yuri-subplot in a manga adaptation of Breakfast of Champions (only a version where everyone still fully dissociates, but never-the-less manages to find true love in the end)- it's both real and a tabloid misprint, true and truly unbelievable, a faithful retelling of events and an A&E daytime slot cash-in, the ending in a choose your own adventure where find your way out of the maze but a werewolf grabs you before you can finish turning the page- some chapters are like a big, streamer-popping parade of marching ska bands, other's are self-contained rock operas in the vein of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders of Mars with a sheen of Glass Beach' enigmatic panache, still others are mere glimpses of the glamorously drab and quotidian strained through a rainbow-stained hyperpop colander, pulping emo sparkle riffs through a tilting-whirl of jungle threshers to churn out juicy globs of bodacious, breakbeat burlesque. A sapphic bunny/cat romance to define an age of love, tragedy, and the invasion of the internet into the concrete and tangible world. Some epics you read, others to smash play on, this is one of the latter.
