NYC hermit Gobby opens his new album i guess bro with a song called “Party at My House,” and at first glance it seems as much like a one-joke pony as the album’s title. “There’s a party at my house,” he drawls in an utterly bored tone, sounding like the world’s most blasé host. But as the song goes on, it unmoors into druggier territory—Goosebumps string staccato, twee-pop bells, the urgent strumming of an acoustic guitar that sounds like it was barely tuned, let alone miked. If this is what a party sounds like, you have to break through a couple layers of abstraction to see the picture Gobby is trying to paint. And are those crickets? Not exactly the sound you’d want to hear echoing back at you at your function.
Welcome to the world of Gobby, who’s consistently put out some of the strangest music of the legions of beatmakers turned solo auteurs that emerged from the blog-rap era. He made his name producing for NYC cool kids like Le1f and Mykki Blanco in the early 2010s, but the real meat of his catalog is his sprawling beat tapes. The 2014 album Wakng Thrst for Seeping Banhee in particular is a deranged masterpiece of zombified, sleepwalking funk, honored with a five-star review from Tinymixtapes and seemingly forgotten about since. His releases can be spotty just by virtue of being truly experimental—he’ll try anything once—but they’re consistently some of the wildest rides in the world of underground electronic music, and i guess bro is no exception.
The tender Auto-Tune on “Country Drill,” in tandem with the listless vocal on “Party at My House,” might make you wonder if he hasn’t hitched himself to post-Drain Gang developments in rap atmosphere, or the pop miniaturists who’ve transmuted them into the experimental sphere. But there are also segments that go the opposite direction into hard-edged drum maximalism and clipped samples, club music for the deficient of attention span. At no point is his mind at rest, not least during a mid-album run of sub-one-minute songs that plays like a shroomed-out Abbey Road medley—including a bouquet of diva-moan samples called “Epiffany” that creates a sultry atmosphere for 56 seconds and dips out, or a circus-orchestra lark called “Siri” that seems to mock the pathetic condition of an artificial mind forced to perform.
Reverb exists as a dull fishbowl clunk, the orchestral palette is the crudest MIDI, and the vocal processing is frequently disturbing, never more so than in “Decline Recline,” which plays like a conversation between a church mouse and a malevolent force haunting the building’s walls. There’s a track named after Oscar winner The Brutalist that compresses 216 minutes of movie into an economical 1:18 data crunch; it’s funny if meant as a film-nerd joke, less so if intended as a statement on the way artists’ hard work is ground down into grist for the content mill. It’s followed by two more tracks named after Adrien Brody vehicles, as if the album didn’t already feel like flipping through channels until the static on the TV and in your mind are one and the same.
i guess bro never declares itself as a statement about the deadening, numbing effects of modern life, but everything from the album’s shrug of a name to the titles’ images of helplessness (“Habitrail” is a brand of hamster cage) to the album’s glut of content in a totally airless context all speak to a life spent in front of screens. This is not a world you explore but a blizzard of information you weather; this can make it hard on the ears, especially when Gobby gets shrieky with the string patches on “The Pianist,” but it’s hard to ignore just how much flashes by your ears as i guess bro races through 21 tracks in 39 minutes. This arid hellworld doesn’t seem like a place where creativity would flourish, but the music buzzes with it.
