FLABmag is an Arts & Culture Magazine for Discriminating Smart Asses.
Hipster Boys Make Graves/ Rhode Island's MakeupBreaup
Not in a thousand Golden Years could Providence, Rhode Island’s MakeupBreakup be as appealing as disco era David Bowie and how Outburn Magazine, a self-proclaimed ‘cutting edge’ music mag (Who the fuck prints anymore!? Don’t they know it’s fiscally imprudent and ecologically unsound?), can print such heresy is beyond me. Nowhere on their We Prefer Not To, nor their latest release, Scents, is there a hint of the musical brilliance of Bowie or the sexy/sleazy innuendos crooned by Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan, but Outburn makes such claims without a hint of irony.
Let me break it down: this is a band for teens to twenty-five year olds who’ve recently discovered The Faint, The Hills, who purchase their skinny jeans from Pete Wentz’ clothing line and believe anal sex is ok on the first date, in other words, for kids without any historical context or culture depth but still proclaim to be edgy specifically because magazines like Outburn and Bust tell them they are by dictating what they wear and what they listen to.
I honestly hate dumping on people’s creative output, and I am a firm believer that anyone can find an audience, but that doesn’t mean the work is art nor does it warrant allusions to musical geniuses. For example, Thomas Kinkade is the most widely collected landscape painter in the world but he is no Thomas Cole. Kinkade makes work for people with a basic, practically nonexistent, capacity to look beyond the surface of a canvas. His work reaffirms their basic understanding of home, hearth and happiness; themes beloved by the Middle American masses who are the actual collectors of his work. And, in much the same way, bands like The Faint and MakeUpBreakUp are like Thomas Kinkade but without the multimillion-dollar sales. They strum the same jangly saccharine-infused tunes replete with time worn metaphors of love and bad make up break ups, in the same boring meter, song after song. Every song on the Scents disc sounds the same so much so it’s difficult to distinguish one from the other. Their reaffirming lyrics, simply because they are unoriginal, and familiar sound is appealing to the children of those Thomas Kinkade collectors.
Yet they bare a particular sheen because they are so ‘foreign’ to Middle America and that’s because they’re from Rhode Island, a state that seems to be making a stab at musical integrity what with RISD’s Fang Island making the writers at Pitcfork jizz their panties. But MUBU (if your band name can be abbreviated into what looks like the name of a Pokemon character…you’re officially a teeny bopper band) is no Fang Island. Actually, they aren’t even The Faint. But still, they might be able to pull a decent mall crowd if they ever venture away from the east coast.
I don’t know what it is that inspires boys to write these trite paeans to what sounds like, based on the lyrics found on Scents, the most annoying chicks, but if you’re one of those boys this band is for you. I think it must be lack of experience or a case of the late bloomers. Like they’ve only just discovered the fact they have penis’ in their too tight jeans but are still uncertain of how to use it. In any case Mubu’s Scents has ‘ten years too late’ skinny jeans wearing Emo boy slathered all over it.
Special Note: Flabmag would never tell you what you should or shouldn’t listen to. We’ll just tell you why it is or isn’t hackneyed. You can go ahead and listened to it all you want.
Go on…visit them on the interwebs:
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