M.B.D.T, Joe

Sometimes when I burp I let the burp escape through my nose instead of my mouth. It tickles a little bit and burns a little bit and makes my eyes water. I like the sensation. It allows me to feel something. It reminds me that I'm alive.

This is probably one of the only behaviors I still carry with me from my beer-drinking years, since you can experience the same effect after drinking soda or seltzer. Except now it's stringent lemony or dark sugary instead of mellow bready aromas. I'm only hypothesizing at the "it allows me to feel something" answer. That's maybe, but not definitely, why I have this impulse to make my eyes water.

I remember that cousins-not-related had a family friend who would always be over their house during backyard barbecues. I didn't really interact with her too often, but something that's been stuck in my head for like 25 years now is something my mom said about her. She said that she was wearing a kerchief on her head because she had an uncontrollable impulse to pull her own hair out. That shit freaked me out. Not the lack of hair, that's whatever, and she probably looked cute in a kerchief. More so the idea that we as humans contain within us impulses of self-harm. And that occasionally, that self-harm, when minor so as to not inflict lasting damage, can help us feel alive.

Pulling hairs off my head felt good, I discovered in my own youth. This was after the cousin-not-related's family friend pulled most of her hair out. I tried it, and I liked it. And that scared the hell out of me. I didn't want to be bald as a teen. I felt the impulse too but I held back. Maybe pulled a single strand of hair off my scalp once a month or so, ya know, just as a little treat. It felt bad but it felt good in the way that it felt bad. It sounds backwards but it's really not that hard to grasp. We inflict harm on ourselves all the time. We ingest poison for a night out, we plaster art onto our skin with needles, we push pedals to feel g-forces, we stick cotton instruments into our ears even though the people who make those instruments beg us not to, we crack knuckles, we lie on beach blankets in the full-on sun and fall asleep, we stuff ourselves with animals fats that will clog our hearts. We burp out of our noses.

I don't know if DJ Arana's music feels good. I think it feels bad. But it feels good in the way it feels bad. It's painful like a blast of lime-flavored bubbles through the nostrils. I am awake and alert when I listen to M.B.D.T. I understand my life and am aware of my consciousness. I hurt; I feel alive.

Oh christ, how do I even explain this album (without resorting to more wild tangents)? Some stray observations. It's pretty sparse. When the description was a good one if you "like noise," then I was expecting a wall-out-sound-type production. But it really wasn't that. The noises were loud, but DJ Arana usually decided to make one loud noise at a time. And there usually wasn't any music at all when he was yelling his catchphrase. I don't know if I'd call it "catchy." Maybe "memorable" is a better word here. Memorable like the time at that family party that we were playing wiffleball and I accidentally hit the brother of the hair-puller right in the eye with a bat. I.e. painful. But memorable because pain is memorable. It has a way of searing itself into your brain. I remember more pain than joy. Maybe that's what DJ Arana is going for.

Wouldn't put it past him. My first thought at the beginning of the week was: "this sounds like when Bad Bunny listens to SOPHIE once." Aesthetically, that description might be in the ballpark, but logistically, it's way off. Namely because DJ Arana is, at nineteen years old, half the age that SOPHIE would have been this year, and eleven years younger than Bad Bunny. DJ Arana is just a kid. He's fucking around. It's working, like, it's captivating, and feels new in a way that only that young folk can create new. Maybe all artists feel like this at age nineteen. It's almost beneficial when you don't know anything about life and art and human emotion. You can't at that age. But then you still create something, and it's alien in an offputtingly beautiful way.

And it sucks. It's annoying and it sucks. It's headache-inducing. It doesn't even sound like a song. It's one sound and that sound is a horn and then it's two sounds and the second sound is a guy hollering in a different language, and then the horn goes away and he's asking you VVWHAT?! like you're the one who's doing something stupid and insane. When there are four sounds, one of the them is the biggest bass drum you've ever heard, and another one is DJ Arana mumbling "big, big, big, big" and the production value drops to like zero and it sounds like he's saying "big" over a transistor radio or something.

I'm just painting a picture of the sounds with words. Not really necessary, I don't know why I'm doing it. Maybe to illustrate that you can choose to hear these sounds as palatable or discordant. I'm usually leaning latter. I usually have music playing in my ears during all work hours (and there have been a lot of work hours lately), like I'll be listening to music while typing a child abuse report or some shit, but I couldn't do it with M.B.D.T. It was too much. It was too distracting. It's like when I'm doing some arduous household chore like folding laundry and I keep getting asked daddy can I have a SNACK??? and I'm like getting way too upset over the simple request, by simple matter of having to concentrate on two things at once.

So I guess in that sense, you can say that this album constantly pulls your attention. When framed that way, it sounds like a compliment. It probably is, the more I think about it. I keep thinking about pulling strands of hair out of my scalp, still, after all these years. The concentration it takes to grab just one, pull it at just the right speed that it pops out, that rush of anticipation over the impending pain, the thrill when it actually happens, that brief moment of pain and then the blood pumping at double speed from all of the above. All of your focus is on that one moment, that one emotion. Once you start absentmindedly pulling hair, you've lost the game. You gotta be present in the motherfucking moment.

DJ Arana does that too. It's a short album and maybe that's by design. Like this little fucking kid knew that the olds could only handle his blasts of new weird cacophony in small doses. And yet witness me hit repeat like ten times in a row. Not because I like it, and not even the usual Record Club reason (because I have to listen so many times and write a well-informed review or else the world explodes, like Desmond from Lost). More because I feel an odd, harmful compulsion to put that hair again and again. I crack open another seltzer, and I guzzle that shit down, and my tummy rumbles and then the gas exits back through the lungs and I force that shit through the nose, and I cough and I wipe my eyes and I feel more in tune with the universe than I ever have.

GRADE: 3 pukes out of 5