The video game dialog comes from Dance Dance Revolution, at least as Genius.com tells it. That "good luck!" listeners hear as they move through the maximalized crime stories and melodrama of Wallsocket is a piece of mockery / hope pulled from a place so mundane as to already be faded in the fad bin of yesteryear's pop culture. This is a small, nearly meaningless detail, redeemed only by its symmetry with the large project. Here is an album that, for all its extracurricular meta-text (the town is actually an AI space! The characters are revealed in disparate Soundcloud links!), is primarily concerned with that specific American enterprise of picking up the suburbs and shaking them for whatever blood, dust, coins, or slips of photographs end up tumbling out. What underscores finds isn't unique in its subjects (pedophilia, stalking, delusional stalking, bullying, hypocrisy), but the paper they wrap the prizes in is gorgeous. You'd have to go back to Moby—or, yes, Skrillex—to find a pop-electronic artist doing what is done here: presenting rock music as electronic dance with samples and flourishes that are made more meaningful for the specificity of their lifts. Not chopped or screwed but presented on a plate with different lighting. Recognizable but not what it really is.
I have a stomach bug as I write this. I had to stop this paragraph twice to hurl. This is not a good album to listen to under these circumstances. But under almost all others, the seas are calm.
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