Album Review: MC Lars - This Gigantic Robot Kills

Where do I start with a MC Lars album review? To begin such a task, as analysing his latest efforts in the form of ‘This Gigantic Robot Kills’, it is often best to highlight the album’s main genre. However, in my first impressions of a confusing manner, MC Lars crams in as much as possible into the 14 track record that continue his strive against mainstream stereotypes that are encountered in everyday life. The song ‘Hipster Girl’ contains various quotes in the form of a typical high school A-lister cheerleader with ‘Lars rapping with a mocking tone of surreal subtlety. And that is what this album is. A collection of humours songs that each has their own tongue-in-cheek comedy that most people, in this day and age, will agree with and relate to.

And this is one of MC Lars’s strengths. The first listen didn’t really hook me enough to listen to it again and I wrote it off as “Wit that should be kept at a Chris Rock stand up comedy show”. But after actually listening to the lyrics and understanding the genius of MC Lars’ song writing talent, it was then that I kept coming back to this album, to agree with the majority of his stories that he twists and turns throughout the album. ‘True Player For Real’ opens up the album, with MC Lars stating “This is a song about my life” in a welcoming manner. And that is what people love about ‘Lars and his work. He is an extremely relatable artist that many teenagers would not find problems in locating something that they agree with in his entire catalogue of ‘Post Punk Laptop Rap’.

The content of the tracks contain a vast berth of ideas, some are interesting, brilliant and unmatched by not many other artists, other are not so. Probably the most rememberable track ‘Guitar Hero Hero (Beating Guitar Hero Doesn’t make You Slash)’ is a very different approach to Chad Kroeger’s negative comments on the popular video game. Lines such as “Friends on MySpace won’t make you a musician, beating Operation doesn’t make you a physician” are ones that are many other comedy lyricists, such as Bowling For Soup, wouldn’t dream of putting in their songs. However, the song ’35 Laurel Drive’ has MC Lars singing/rapping/whatever about how messy his drummer’s house is. I’m not sure if I am taking these types of songs far too seriously but it’s almost as ridiculous as Lostprophet’s Ian Watkins singing about following sheep around. And this is pretty much how most will listen to the album. Skip a track here and there to listen to the real genius that shines through the filler that pad out this record.

In the writing stages of the album, MC Lars must have thrown as many ideas as he can at a sheet of paper then just recorded that, causing some of the songs to be a bit too clustered and to not have much flow. Despite this issue, ‘Lars has clearly put together a fairly solid-ish record, even hiring the likes of Weird Al Yankovich and MC Bat Commander of the Aquabats to help his reign of comedy become more known. A brilliant attempt, but a few songs pull the record down from being one of excellence.

4/5

'This Gigantic Robot Kills' will be released through Crappy Records on 24th February.

Andy Touch