Secret Mommy
Mammal Class
(Orthlong Musork)
I absolutely love the trouncing of Top 40 music (see Kid 606's gleeful mashup The Action Packed Mentallist Brings You The Fucking Jams or several entries in the 2ManyDJs series) and I enjoy medium-fi glitched-out pop workouts (see Dat Politics and others), so I'm not sure why this newest release by Secret Mommy doesn't do a lot for me. On her debut, I found more than enough to enjoy, but while this release often tickles my funnybone, it's such a splatter job that it makes my head hurt if I haven't yet had my morning intake of coffee.
It all starts out innocently enough, as the short "AOL Keyword Party" blares one word by both Madonna and Pearl Jam to form the artist title in a hilarious intro before the album skitters into the goofy click-glurp of "An Apple A Day Keeps The Mac Voice Away." Mixing bits of trumpet and electric piano with a hyper cut-up beat, the happy little Mac voice sings playful vocals to keep things rolling. It's on "ScrtMmmy: The Shame Of Pink To Come" where things start going off the rails, though. With the emphasis on spastic, the song is an ass-over-teakettle sonic cutup that mashes Pink and Mary J Blige into a ball of static and sped up vocals, rendering them both almost unrecognizable (which I suppose is the point).
After that, "Ta-Da Peru" shatters a French educational record and pieces it together with destroyed Arab On Radar and other bits while "Bottom 40" takes the most annoying syllables from everyone's favorite pop star (guess) and splices them with Speak N' Spell and acoustic guitar. On the flip side, there are tracks that are both hilarious and work well. After a mindbending intro, "Andrew W. Cake" takes the screams of the rock wildman and mixes with with party horns, balloons and childrens voices for a pitch-tweaked track that might just have you humming along. Likewise, "Shania Twang" mixes the singer with the similar namesake with the sound of farmyard animals, mouth harp, and Rancid for a track that sounds like a hyperactive b-side to the recent Matmos / People Like Us / Wobbly release Wide Open Spaces.
At 13 tracks and about 36 minutes, the album is on the short side, but the absolutely insane tracks pack about three times the activity of a normal release into that short time. Although there are a lot of major-name artists mentioned above, it will take a fairly keen ear to recognize most of the samples pulled from their music. Mostly, Mammal Class is about building tracks of the shards of Top 40 and turning out something that would most likely scare the shit out of someone who listened to that music normally.
Rating: 6.25
