It’s that special time of the month when you get together with friends and family to play some board games and have a wholesome good time. But routine gets boring. Sometimes you need to liven things up, and the best way to do that is a curated playlist of the most annoying Death Grips songs possible. So throw these songs on whenever you want to clear the room and get home early.
Get Got
Get Got is a perfect introductory song to Death Grips. Your friends playing Operation will be lulled into a false sense of security and happiness from the rough industrial beat. All you need to do is make sure someone else is taking out water on the brain when MC Ride’s shriek comes in. Be sure to be inches away from the other player’s face mouthing the lyrics as they attempt surgery.
No Love
No Love is the ideal pairing for ruining a game of Scattergories. You’ll roll a G and get writing while the other players are preoccupied trying to understand what the fuck MC Ride is saying, and wondering why he’s saying it so loudly. The buzzer will go off right as your friends turn to one another and ask who’s cock is on the album cover. Meanwhile you got double score from writing Gal Gadot under actors.
Death Grips is Online
Good luck playing Password while getting hit with an auditory wall of nonsense punctuated with occasional ‘Death Grips is Online’. Sure, you might be able to describe an ostrich without using certain words, but your partner is going to be spending that time utterly befuddled as to why someone would pay money to listen to this music.
Guillotine
Charades, at the best of times, is a difficult game to play. But when you plug in your iPod Nano and start blasting “Guillotine,” things get even tougher. Your friends might ask you to stop chanting ‘it goes it goes it goes it goes’ while Susan tries in vain to mime “The Godfather Part II.” Fortunately if they get close to the answer you can just scream ‘YEAH’ until they lose their train of thought.
https://open.spotify.com/track/3IrcvqIf3ZiBhf3xdsctRX?si=45af011f785e44cd
I’ve Seen Footage
Nothing goes with Movie Trivial Pursuit than a song about seeing footage. Surely your friends will relate to MC Ride when you show them the Zapruder Film on repeat and insist that they stay noided. Sure they’ll try to ask about who starred in “My Favorite Year,” but you can just tell them how much crazy shit you’ve seen and demand that that was actually Val Kilmer’s body double in “Top Gun” so you technically got that question correct.
The Fever (Aye Aye)
How cute, you’re trying to read the fun fact about American Sparrows from Wingspan out loud. Too bad Zach Hill mixed this one so nutty that all you can think about is burning down a rich motherfucker’s house. Put that wetland bird down and destroy your surroundings, I don’t care if this bitch can fly in flocks of tens of thousands. Wait tens of thousands, really? That’s a lot.
You Might Think He Loves You For Your Money But I Know What He Really Loves You For
Honestly the others might just leave during this one because it sounds really bad and Scrabble isn’t engaging enough to keep people around. You aren’t doing your board game party any favors by ripping your shirt off and freaking out your work friends with your blood curdling screams. Although you did manage to pull off ‘Jazz’ with a triple word score so they might just be sore losers.
Giving Bad People Good Ideas
Much like Risk, “Giving Bad People Good Ideas” starts out pleasant enough but quickly degrades into murder and mayhem. You’ll be taking Kamchatka while you shake in your chair along with the beat. Your friends will ask if you’re ok, and if it’d be ok to switch to Codenames and Miley Cyrus. Your only response can be to pull your own hair out and begin your march to claim Australia from the heathens.
Hacker
Your friends are wrapped up in Twister, Carly Rae Jepsen is blasting on the speaker. You can’t be stopped. You put on “Hacker” to the protestations of your tangled friends. While they’re busy putting their right hand on green, you can go into their personal possessions and steal anything of value. Not because you need the money, but because it’s what Death Grips would do. When they come out their shit is gone.
Electric Drum Solo Dub Mix
The most recent Death Grips track, an 11 minute drum concerto punctuated with unpleasant rhythms, is the perfect thing to subtly suggest that your friends go home. It’s time for you to sleep, and your nightly routine now includes listening to the equivalent of electric maggots fucking in your earlobes. Who cares if James brought Ticket to Ride? It’s time to party to electric nonsense until your nose spontaneously bleeds.
“Masters of the Universe” did a bang-up job tying our budding sexual desires to various human/animal hybrid creatures, but the spider guy just never grabbed us. Too spidery!
Even as children with zero carnal knowledge, we knew that sex and anything called “Trap Jaw” just didn’t mix.
Skeletor’s pet attack falcon is possibly the least sexy bird creature on Eternia, and that’s coming from someone who is strongly, inexplicably aroused by “Masters of the Universe” bird creatures.
Man-E-Faces was a villain turned hero with the ability to, you guessed it, change his face. His amazing power to have the face of a human, a robot, or a monster allowed him to uh… do that. Yeah, pretty pointless at the end of the day, and not very sexy. He couldn’t even use all three faces at the same time! If he could do that then oh hell yeah, let’s talk, but nah.
Cringer is Prince Adam’s pet cuck, I mean cat. Frankly, we prefer him in his Battle Cat form. Without the Power of Grayskull Cringer is a total bottom.
Sometimes we would hold our Two Bad action figure and meditate on the duality of human nature, and what this innate duplicitousness meant to our cusping sexual identity. Other times we would think to ourselves “Hey, why am I thinking about this shit? I’m 9.”
Though sort of a minor character in the cartoon, the Modulock action figure was cool as hell because it came with over 20 interlocking pieces. The idea was that since his body was amorphous, you could mix and match the pieces to create your own unique version of Modulok every time you played with him. No matter how many different combos we tried, they always seemed to look like genitals.
Spikor planted the seed that Pinhead grew into the sapling that would one day become the tree of us spending $900 on a spiked pleather onesie marketed as “Daddy Pain.”
Kobra Khan was often partnered up with Webstor, and it’s easy to see who got all the sex appeal in that duo. To this day his calculating sinisterness, snake accent, and ability to produce knockout spray from his mouth still arouse the darkest recesses of our fantasies.
Whiplash quickly rose through the ranks of Skeletor’s crew, and it’s not hard to see why. With his take-charge attitude, powerful phallic tail, and a head that resembled our mean neighbor Frank, Whiplash really projected authority. Plus his design kinda makes him look like he’s always wearing a tank top and briefs. Sir yes sir!
There was just something about the feel of his toy’s velvety purple skin that seemed to activate something in us like it was opening the door to a whole spectrum of possibilities both terrifying and tantalizing.
One man with the power of 3 cyclopses? We would be powerless to stop this brute… not that we would want to!
Come on, all of the inherent eroticism of merpeople coupled with the fact that he has legs and therefore presumably genitals? You can’t tell us this guy doesn’t pique your curiosity. Admit it, you wanna know what he’s working with down there.
It’s the veil, it’s just so alluring. You can’t help but wonder what she’s working with under that thing. Probably a black faceless void, same as all Trollans, but still!
Mekaneck was a master spy because of his ability to extend his neck by several feet. If you were a bad guy up to no good several feet above Meganeck, he knew the score. See cause he has this helmet head, and that head extends up by the metal shaft in his neck anytime he gets curious or excited about something. Like maybe he hears a bad guy, or a crime happening, or his “aunt” who was actually just his mom’s best friend so isn’t really his aunt is wearing pantyhose smoking a cigarette with her legs crossed, or like WHATEVER! Anyway, there was something about owning the Meganeck toy that just made us feel confident.
Even as kids we knew having a prurient interest in Eternia’s most powerful villain was wrong, but that’s what made it so irresistible. Sure he’s a living skeleton, but this skeleton is jacked as fuck. Skeletor’s plans always revolved around “getting” people. He would be like “We’ll lure He-man somewhere under false pretenses, and then, we’ll GET HIM!” What happens after he gets someone? The show leaves it up to the viewer’s imagination, and that’s what makes it so erotic.
When it came to giving kids confusing feelings about human/beast hybrids, the Beast from “Beauty and the Beast” will always reign supreme, but for old-school kids who were too cool for Disney, there was Beast Man. Are you seriously going to try to convince us this character didn’t have a sexual undertone when his action figure literally came with a whip AND dat ass? Mattel knows what they’re doing.
Cringer is a pathetic worm of a cat, but when he is imbued with the Power of Grayskull and puts on some bondage gear he becomes the ferocious Battle Cat. At a young age Battle Cat instilled us with the notion that the right gear could make us feel powerful.
We gotta spell it out for you? Dudes name is “Buzz-off!”
Every band has to start somewhere, and Shades Apart’s lone-1980s self-titled LP proves just that. You punks will all claim to love Orange County, California’s Uniform Choice, but we know the truth, and that you only know that one U.C. “Straight and Aware” longsleeve. Anyway, the two Pats of Uniform Choice, P. Dubar and P. Longrie, signed the band to their personal Wishingwell Records label, and put out SA’s debut just after the punk AF George Bush, Junior’s CIA poppa dog was elected Commander-in-chief. Though imperfect like most first records, we believe that the band’s self-titled studio album deserves your time, especially if you’re a hardcore Shades Apart fan and want to hear them literally come of age in sonic form.
Shades Apart’s second/final major label effort, which led to the band going into hibernation for almost twenty years, (we’ll get to that in a bit) was a misfire by definition that landed in a, you guessed it, sonic boom. Perhaps the band would have churned several more LPs by now, instead of just one, if “Sonic Boom” was morphed into a four or five-song no-filler EP, but, alas, the band got shot down by themselves. Still, it would have been quite tough for any band to release a follow-up album to “Eyewitness,” so we can understandably cut the band some slack.
Shortly after the band released their “Dude Danger” EP in 1992, the band put out their second LP “Neon” via St. Paul, Minnesota indie label Skene! Records. This album is likely the good luck charm and sole reason that Revelation Records, then home to post-hardcore legends Farside, Into Another, Iceburn, and Kelly Pickler, signed SA, “Neon” is the band’s first consistent effort front to back, and at just nine blistering tracks, it bashes you in the skull with melodic sensibilities that also work as aggressive lullabies until its finish at just over a half an hour. We’re forever calling for Skene! to upload this LP to DSPs so we can listen to it on a platform not called YouTube.
The COVID-19 pandemic was strange for all of us, but one of the better surprises occurred in the summer of 2020 when Shades Apart released their (lucky) seventh full-length “Eternal Echo,” and it ended up becoming their finest LP from this century. Happily, it’s mostly light not in terms of subject, but in regards to brightness and overall quality here! Lots of recording/songwriting technology changed from 2001 to the year that “Eternal Echo” came out, and the band took advantage of such for this album’s creation in the best way. Perhaps if it was released as album #6, things would have been different, but, as an interesting, at least to us, posit, maybe the failure of “Sonic Boom” inspired the victory of this effort.
Likely your favorite release here, unless we’re wrong, but we know that we aren’t, Shades Apart’s debut LP for Revelation Records, “Save It,” is a solid record front to back with the band’s finest original compositions at that time, but it is most known for its “Tainted Love” cover, which is so good it is our “play it again” track below… By the way, that is NOT a bad thing! Fun fact: Synthpop duo Soft Cell’s “classic” non-secret life version is also a cover song, so this version is a cover of a Gloria Jones cover. There is nothing new under the sun. Anyway, reverential doo-wop pioneers Descendents members Bill Stevenson and Stephen Egerton produced this raw yet polished effort to a “T,” and set the band up for the next successful six years or so.
First of all, we hope that DSPs eventually fix the typo in the second word to this album title, as not only is “Seeing Thing” not grammatically correct, it is wrong and the person who uploaded it should be chastised forever and ever. By far Shades Apart’s best non-major label LP, “Seeing Things” is also one of the better/more underrated melodic punk rock albums of the ’90s. Why doesn’t it get its justifiable flowers? Beats us, but we will get over it, turn it back around, and provide a fearless bravado with our fist(s). Also, this LP contains little filler, but we legally had to list one song in the “skip it” section, so we did below. While this studio album is the silver medalist, the divide between number one and two would be smaller if said track was eliminated and the record was just ten tracks.
Speaking of underrated, Shades Apart’s fifth full-length studio album and major label debut for Universal Records is one of the more overlooked rock albums of the ’90s, and try to disagree once you listen for the first time or revisit for the 1999th. There are no “skip it” tracks here at all. In addition, not every band can make the shift from melodic punk rock to beyond melodic pop rock so effortlessly but not every band is SA… What a major label debut! We will forever wish that the band rose to major headliner status, but sadly that’s not how the underground cookie with stevia and salt crumbled. Still, the band had a minor radio hit with track four, “Valentine,” and we can’t scoff at that. We’ll see ourselves out and make our escape at the end of “Casablanca”.