THOTCRIME
THOTCRIME “D1G1T4L-DR1FT”
By Dr. Abner Mality
I hate to be Mr. Wilson from “Dennis The Menace” (a reference the target audience for this record will probably never get) but stuff like this really brings out the grumpy old man in me. I tried hard to grab on to this...and there were certainly points of interest...but it’s so over the top Gen Z edgy hipster sub-millenial without a break that it just about broke me in half.
The band is from all over the place and as you might expect, did everything over the internet. Because what is life and music for these people without the internet? It’s a patched together mish-mash of cyber-grind, glitchy techno-dubcore (hope I got that micro-genre right) and riot grrrl alt-pop. To give the devils their due, the grind is genuinely heavy. There are also bursts of what sounds like manic tech-death metal slipping in there occasionally. As the record wears on, the glitchy techno stuff seems to take prominence and the female vocals lean towards that semi-conversational babble that is probably meant to represent stream of consciousness. The “F-bomb” is dropped to keep things nice and edgy, except it comes across as more snide and juvenile.
Bands in many genres of music try to achieve a kind of timelessness with their music. THOTCRIME is an example of music that will forever be anchored to 2022. There is something very forced and artificial about it...maybe that’s what they were aiming for? The obnoxious “ironic” song titles like “Tweet This!”, “This Is My Breakdown, I Get To Pick The Music”, and “This Isn’t Foundation, Give Me Your Skin Please” really remind me of the silly stuff the metalcore bands of the early 2000’s were doing. For the members of THOTCRIME, that might be an era of nostalgia, which is a frightening thought.
Obviously, I am not the target for “Digital Drift” ( I refuse to do all the “numbers for letters” stuff) and I guess I apologize for that. There are some genuinely catchy bits here, but that’s all they are...bits. This is one of the “bittiest” records I’ve heard in a long spell. Adios, THOTCRIME!