Matthew Kelly1001 Albums You Must Die Before You Hear
#119: Club Eat – Clothes (2023)
MATT KELLY set out to review an album that his kids hate but got stuck on the WTF flatulence of the song ‘Clothes’.
When children are young, they like everything. They have an insatiable appetite for colour, noise, stimulant. They’ll watch any movie, any cartoon, listen to any music, no matter what dreck it is.
So it’s a special moment when their critical faculties spring to life and they tell you, “This is the worst thing I have ever heard.”
The album that made me a proud parent of the next generation of haters was Start by Club Eat, which my late-teen offspring discovered through YouTube Music, and it was enough to make them want to nuke their account and retrain the algorithm.
With questions around my child’s online wellbeing being the clear priority, the first thing I thought of was this list, and I was off to listen to Start, but decided not to include it, tragically wasting my hilarious one-word review consisting of “Stop”.
I’m in broad agreement that the electropop duo’s debut album is bad, producer Chicken’s production thin and flatulent, frontwoman Ren G one-note as a lyricist and none-note as a vocalist. Still, Ren G has a cute energy, it’s frothy and camp to purpose, and I can see it working as club-prep music.
HOWEVER. There are a few songs on here that cross the line from “charmingly crap” to “Okay, this is awful”. My steely gaze pauses on dubious play-rape anthem ‘Surprise’ where Ren cheerfully chirps:
“I was half asleep, and then I woke up
To you deep in me, I kept my mouth shut
Don’t have to worry it’s a secret I’ll keep”
I need a shower every time.
But it was this song here, ‘Clothes’, that stood out as the prime nuke-from-orbit target. And it’s not the lyrics, though I wish vocalists would learn that declaring the listener wants to see them naked is rather an imposition. It’s that this sounds So. Fucking. Annoying.
Attempting to revive the electroclash sound we left in an unmarked grave circa 2008, Chicken’s comically tropey beat serves as a backdrop for the most wannabe-Tik-Tok-sound-ass verse you could ever hope to never hear. Then we get a beatless dollar-store church organ sound on the bridge, which makes no sense as a transition into a chorus on which Ren attempts to qualify to represent the USA in Nasal Voice at the next Olympics. Judging by the accompanying music, Chicken has lost interest in the track at this point and is instead killing a bunch of enemies in Mario. Oh, and that part in the second verse where Ren says, “Whatcha lookin’ at me for?” over and over. Ugh. More like, “What am I listening to you for?”
