Drugs Food Entertainment Sex - Drugs Food Entertainment Sex
Drugs Food Entertainment Sex are a four-piece band from Chicago, Illinois. Their music is aesthetically somewhere between garage, bedroom, and some drug-filed psychedelic apartment amid the firmament and Earth. The band’s debut, self-titled Drugs Food Entertainment Sex, is am admirable front-loaded album with some incredibly striking singles, followed by a rather substandard track listing.
As mentioned earlier, the opening songs are gorgeous. Distraction is an elated and exceptionally well-crafted opener, elevated by joyful instrumental interludes and harmonic female vocals towards the end. The offbeat percussion and jammy interluding sections give plenty of life to Breaking Under. The range of the band is quite commendable, as exhibited on more sombre tracks such as Funeral (Never Ran Away). There are good singles further down the tracklisting, too; Perfect Broken Coyphee is both majestically sombre and impeccably paced, and Flatline Kids is creative and thoroughly enjoyable. Both harken back to the expressive freedoms of Mercury Rev, while unleashing powerful electronic symphonies in line with Health.
Unfortunately, much of the remaining album suffers from lacklustre compositions. Roses is when the songwriting gets sloppy. The instrumentals carry the song less, as the vocals take lead; while the vocals are good, they are not as compelling as the instrumentation. At times, the vocals feel very mumbly and poorly mixed, such as during Tommoro Nite. Lastly, songs such as Signs, One More Day in Heaven and I’m So Tired (of Waking Up) suffer from both poor songwriting and energetically-void execution. The album is marred by average compositions such as these.
Drugs Food Entertainment Sex is the ultimate singles album; had the LP been a 5-6 song EP, it would have been incredibly easy to recommend, yet sadly the album tends to revisit over-done indie/punk-rock conventions, without anything meaningful to contribute. What makes the singles stand out are their ingenious and unpredictable progressions; the songs that repeat their idea and rely on their aesthetic purely do not have the same impact. Here’s hoping on their next effort Drugs Food Entertainment Sex will break the conventions more.
Above Average
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Drugs Food Entertainment Sex - Drugs Food Entertainment Sex
