In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 essay “The Crack-Up,” the writer describes a period in which his mind runs amok; he loses the desire to strive and socialize and withers into a sad-sack cynic. His main source of entertainment is list-making—football players, popular songs, suits he’s worn—and he becomes bitter about the most trivial things. He reflects that once upon a time, before the crack-up, he fancied it “a romantic business to be a successful literary man—you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived.” It must feel similar to be an experimental musician, nobly laboring to shatter the boundaries of sound, yet receiving minimal fanfare and being misconstrued by critics. Jack Callahan and Jeff Witscher’s debut joint record, Think Differently, unravels like a musical midlife crisis. It interrogates their careers and the experimental scene but also feels like a long improv sketch, a self-aware simulation of two avant-gardists losing their head and going pop. Call it SoundClown performance art.
Think Differently’s hyper-eclectic pulp-rock and quivering Auto-Tune hooks will startle anyone who’s only familiar with their stim-board sound collages. Take Callahan’s Trap Studies, which rewired Zaytoven and Lex Luger shards into what sounds like an isolated FL Studio layer left on loop after the producer fell asleep. Network Glass’ Twitch, released on Witscher’s label, pooled audio from random streams into a frazzled info overload. The closest thing to Think Differently is their surreal 2023 performance “Bring the Flowers to the Theatre,” where they deadpanned on insular themes like review scores and delay effects and punctuated sentences with inane FX. It might be the only performance in history to include jokes about Ridgewood gentrification and also the “BABA BOOEY” groan.
The album plays out the same—sardonic and sincere skits about their lives as musicians constantly interrupted by puerile soundbites—but with a new layer of zany alt-rock and trip-hop. Instead of Fitzgerald writing lists of cavalry leaders and football players, the duo assembled a terabytes’ worth of meme effects. They seem to have deliberately chosen the most grating and overused sounds, perhaps to express their dread about the internet and cultural sterility. There’s a Roblox “oof” grunt, the Taco Bell bong, and “ohmaaagawd.” There’s an interpolation of Linkin Park’s “In the End”; one song deploys Masked Wolf’s infamously awful "Astronaut in the Ocean" as a riser. The opener is a spoken-word remix of “I miss the old Kanye,” but this time what’s pined for is music with “soul.” It lashes against the “Bandcamp bestowed,” “status quo,” “bar so low” music of today; there are vocals from AI versions of Mr. Krabs and Peter Griffin. Imagine a meme megamix for washed-up Redditors—it’s the kind of album that works best as fodder for Discord debates, not necessarily as a repeat listening experience.
Trapped inside the skittering shitposts are gripes and anxieties, mostly confined to the world of experimental music discourse. “Boiler Room” derides the electronic media institution. “Thank you for giving me this wonderful opportunity to… create content for ad revenue,” Callahan croaks in copious voice-correction software, like a constipated Laura Les. It’s often hard to tell if they’re being serious or silly, whether they’re two dudes rediscovering their love of music or going Smash Mouth and “Losing My Edge” mode as a bit. The ambivalence is the point; the album drips with the desire to be dissected, but also wants to be silly enough to frame itself as scallywags goofing off. At the end of “Who Knows Where the Time Goes,” a Cameo they ordered from a TikTok comedian goes: “Oh, you do experimental music? You did the experiment. What’s the outcome? Oh, nobody like y’all stuff, dog. Time to move on.” The tongue is so far in cheek it’s about to poke through. Elsewhere, they seem genuinely depressed about the unsustainable state of touring and the experimental scene. At its best, there’s a kind of doomer catharsis to the way Callahan and Witscher constantly return to the idea of wasted time, wondering if their lives add up to anything more than the sum of their nights spent in clubs and days on the road.
The sweet instrumentation helps offset the memes and insidery, like an aural antidote for normies without brainworms. Callahan’s churning, galloping guitar provides the album’s giddy field-trip groove. “Long Drive” rolls and pops with the unwieldy bounce of a monster truck in a cartoon. The grayscale glide of “Participation Trophy” syncs up smoothly with the dry delivery. Ana Roxanne’s ribbon-soft melodies on “Hate the Player” hit like a touch-grass moment. But Callahan and Witscher’s concerns would feel more urgent if the songs actually jolted the brain with wild weirdness, rather than being swathed in a blanket of winky brainrot rock. It’s like British producer Baron Mordant’s stream-of-conscious mocking of left-field music fatuities, but neither texturally haunting nor bitingly witty. At least now the world has a song about loving the grind of creating art, despite it often feeling like a frivolous fool’s errand, that also features reverb Dave Chappelle and the goofy ahh ringtone. They did the experiment.
Correction: Network Glass’ 2020 album Twitch was released on Jeff Witscher’s label; it is not Witscher’s own album.
