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VICE Album Reviews, September 18: 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks, Cara Delevingne, and More

Smoking the new releases from Adult DVD, Protomartyr, Julia Jacklin, M83, and Soft Cell like they’re DMT vapes.

By Adam Christopher Smith

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Music journalism is going to the wall, and places for sensible, well-informed, nuanced takes on the latest releases are dwindling. So we thought we might as well put the final nail in the coffin.

Read this month’s album reviews here, here and here.

300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny SparksTHIS IS SPA TOWN!XL RecordingsI can only apologize for my role in popularizing “UK Poo,” a term that has but should absolutely not be applied to this new collaboration between 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks. Admittedly, lead single “The Ballad of St Nick’s Park” has many of the microgenre’s key features: absurdity, naive charm, and a music video featuring shirtless kids necking Courvoisier and sour candy outside a mini-supermarket. With screamo vocals, 8-bit keyboards, and speed garage wobble bass, the project lays a pipe from the noughties dancefloor hysterics of Test Icicles, Klaxons, and Hadouken! through to contemporary jerk and hyperpop. So I think it would be far more appropriate to call it Poo Rave.

This record blazes, brief and exhilarating, with a suburban blend of teenage bedroom music and underage party anthems. The project was inspired by DIY emo artist 300Skulls’ abruptly moving back in with his parents, and going down to London most weekends to work on songs with bassline producer Jenny Sparks. The resulting music, according to amateur YouTube musicologists, “captures the era when the chavs, emos, skaters and middle class kids all chilled at the same park with the skate ramp… all brought together by weed and booze.” And listening to THIS IS SPA TOWN!, I had the uncanny sensation that brain cells I thoroughly fried in the mid-2000s were slowly struggling to fire back to life.

In fact, this all feels a little like one of those videos I keep getting served, showing........

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