Album Review: Megabear

To be clear: we are here because of the conceit. This album exists in the world and will always exist in my mind because of how it is structured, and that's it. So let's get that out of the way, and then we can circle back to why this makes Megabear a good album, but impedes it from being a great one.

Okay, so, Megabear, from the band ME REX. A London-based band that, like many great musical projects, started as the moniker of a solo artist (in this case, a guy named Myles McCabe), before eventually morphing into a full-band effort. Megabear is technically ME REX's debut album, though last year I considered Triceratops / Stegosaurus an LP, even though it was a "double EP," which is fucking stupid and I hate it.

But I didn't hate the music. Kinda reminded me (and others) of Los Campesinos!, with its thick-accented fast-talky snark layered on top of the fourth-wave emo playbook (so I'm told—I don't talk waves). It was good shit. I ranked it high on an auxiliary top music 2020 list. I was excited to hear that there was more music to come this year.

Alright, the conceit: Megabear has 52 songs. Most of them are 32 seconds long—with exceptions, but still combining for a sub-40-minute album. But what sets this album apart is that it is intended to be played on shuffle. Intended by the artist, ME REX a.k.a. Myles McCabe. He says that you should always play Megabear on shuffle, and it should always work. All the songs are in the same key (or whatever), and all of them naturally segue into whatever happens to come up next in the order.

 

I mean, I guess this works for me better than it would other people, right? I have all the songs on an iPod that still has a shuffle function. It makes sense. If you're trying to do exactly as the artist intended, then I'm in a better position than many. If you're listening to it on Bandcamp or on vinyl, then you're shit out of luck—the order has been set. It was set by Myles McCabe literally pressing shuffle on his own music and writing down the order and committing it to the website or the pressings, but it's still set. I can do shuffle, and so I can honor the wishes of the artist.

 

But you know me, and so you also know that this whole idea makes me way more uncomfortable than it would other people. My problem is that I respect the standard idea of "the album." I like that there is a static piece of music, structured in such a way, that I can listen to over and over, and become comfortable with in its actual form. I like when the artist has a vision, lays that vision down, and allows me to consume it in the same way, repeatedly. An album having structure gives my own life structure, in a way.

However, I am also a stickler for the artist's intentions, and tend to follow them to a T when possible. Dumb capitalizations, bonus tracks that are "actually" part of the album, and so on. I'll do it. That apostrophe in "the Old 97's" makes me so goddamn anxious, but I still use it because that's what the band wants. If ME REX is telling me to play Megabear on shuffle, then I'm going to do it every fucking time without exception.

So I guess it's the juxtaposition, that untenable conflict between an artist who is telling me to treat an album in a certain way and how uncomfortable that treatment makes me feel, that ultimately gives me grief about Megabear.

It's a goddamn shame I'm so neurotic about this kind of shit, because the music itself is pretty good. I'll say this: for an album that could be played on shuffle in 8.065x10^67 different permutations, it always seems to work well. Very, very rarely do I even notice that one song is ending and another song is beginning, so seamless is the switch. If we're comparing how much of a challenge this must've been to how efficiently the challenge was met, then consider Megabear an overwhelming success.

The thing is, I will never feel that "connection" with Megabear that I do with other great albums, and that is directly because of its structure. Think about how much track sequencing plays into our opinions of albums—Song A was great and lead perfectly into the banger Song B, while Song C was a beautiful breather, and so on—and then think about how you'll NEVER get that with Megabear. Think about how reading the lyrics might enhance your understanding of an album's themes, and then picture trying to jump around Genius.com throughout 52 different lyric sheets—by the time you figure out what song it is and click on the appropriate webpage, the 32-second song is already over. Think about how these reviews usually feature a couple songs embedded at the end of the blog post, and then try to figure out how to do that, when every song individually means absolutely nothing.

There's achievement in being able to throw 52 songs in a barrel, pick 'em out at random, and easily be able to pretend that this is all a cohesive artist statement. At the end of the day, though, you're still just pretending, and Megabear has made it so that you can never stop pretending, ever. 

It's absolutely wild to me that this is how ME REX has decided to officially introduce themselves. I would've been totally cool with another double EP of emo cockney anthems. And to again be clear: there are 52 shades of what ME REX does best, all over this album, and I like it a lot. But... what would the saying be, the whole suffers despite the sum of its parts, I guess?!

This is a good album because I like listening to it. I don't think ME REX has a bad album in them (and I hope they are around for decades and decades so that we can find out). But Megabear is the worst case of cutting oneself off at the knees that I have ever seen. True, ME REX stands taller than many bands even without shins or feet, but man, imagine how towering this could've been without the goddamn hacky and frustrating premise.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5