100 gecs: 10,000 gecs Album Review

On the surface, gecs are the least serious group this side of early-’90s Ween, always game for a deceptively asinine good time. That the few samples on this album come from Cypress Hill, Scary Movie, and Lucasfilm, in the form of the THX Deep Note, tell you all you need to know: The internet is an earwig that has broken millennials’ brains. 10,000 gecs sounds like being hit in the face with pies for approximately 26 minutes, two best friends having the greatest time throwing all the dankest shit from their musical file cabinet at you while you accept your ridiculous fate. It’s a reevaluation of the most declassé and dunderheaded rock genres that roiled the 2000s, positing that when it’s not delivered by misogynistic frat guys, it can be terrific music. 100 gecs are speaking to and for the regressive ids of us all; dumb shit should be inclusive too. This is a discomfiting and liberating revelation for those of us whose hangover from the era is still acute. At least younger listeners hearing these genres for the first time will be spared the green sky.

100 gecs’ aesthetic, of course, is to throw shit at the wall until it slithers down in a slimy, glittery goop. “Billy Knows Jamie,” a paranoid meditation on a homicidal stalker, is a fairly straightforward number based on bass chunking and turntable scratches that sounds a lot like Limp Bizkit until it spirals out into its death-metal outro. “One Million Dollars” is that phrase repeated ominously over a cut-and-paste sound sketch of drum machine, funk-metal bass, grunge guitar, and clipped dubstep, a frenetic warning that a million dollars rules, but actually might kind of suck. On the brilliant “The Most Wanted Person in the United States,” a laff riot written from the perspective of a serial killer on the lam, Brady and Les trade verses about imaginary victims over a pitched-down iteration of dancehall’s iconic Sleng Teng riddim, and include the lyric “I got Anthony Kiedis/Suckin’ on my penis.” 

I mean, it rhymes! But as an evocation, it aligns 100 gecs with the boneheaded horniness of early Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sloughing off a large amount of the glitch, gecs seem to aim evermore in that general greasy direction: Primus, Mike Patton, Ween, with all the unevenness that implies. The ska-punk revival joint, “I Got My Tooth Removed,” is more Reel Big Fish than Sublime, but it’s still a good time, even if it conjures mean SoCal boys singing thickheaded lyrics about scene girls. (Its mournful lyrics about dental care—it’s a break-up song about a tooth extraction—are both reclamation and send-up of exactly how ignorant and sexist some of those songs were.) The unifying factor here, as ever, is their cleverness. It’s the type of absurdist sensibility that, if it came from a friend, might inspire you to put your hand on their back and lovingly ask if they’re doing okay. But here, that emotional wall is the gag, like when you want to play the rubbery lullaby “Frog on the Floor” for a small child, except then you’d have to explain what a kegstand is. 

In the gecs’ worldview, nothing is serious and yet every chord change is deeply felt, which, after a few listens, may be a bit more interesting in concept than execution. At the same time, this album is so short that you might only come to that conclusion after running it back for the twenty-third time, by which point you’re hitting repeat on the janky car stereo while you’re chain-vaping a nicotine flavor called “Watermelon Brizz Ice,” you’re mainlining Monster Energy drink and moshing solo in your living room until it hurts, you’re copping $600 Collina Strada jeans embellished to look like Ed Hardy’s brainwaves, you’ve got your face entombed in a VR headset and you’re wondering whether you still have a torso, you just want to hug your friends even though they haven’t bathed in weeks. 10,000 gecs is something like astral projection, allowing you to ever-so-briefly shake off the constant doom scroll of life for a hot second of unencumbered fun. In that sense, it’s a perfect outro album for the end of the world, a reminder that in the worst-case scenario, we might as well go out mindless and partying.