Gay For Johnny Depp - 'What Doesn't Kill You, Eventually Kills You'

 

Brooklyn’s Gay For Johnny Depp bring together an album with the appropriately blunt name of What Doesn’t Kill You, Eventually Kills You with song names of insidious obscurity and revelling puns that make you feel like shrivelling up in a paranoid pornographic mess. Their strive to be a sex fuelled ‘Blood Money’ is carried on right through to their stage names (Sid Jagger, Chelsea Piers) and their snide comments about the sound of their album as “children being thrown from a carney carousel” are equally as intriguing as they are discouraging. Yet, after 20 minutes of vulgar screams in homoerotic tones about their love / hate fantasies about Johnny Depp, the album’s title thankfully doesn’t quite live up to its promise, although it comes critically close.
As the album kicks off with the profusely named ‘Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny and Artistic Integrity’, a guitar-ridden ball of energy is thrown at you, seeping right through to your bones. Amalgamated guitars, sirens and screams pleasurably tear away at your skull as you come to terms with Marty Leopard’s statement of “you’ll never be one of us” – although I can’t think of anyone who’d want to. Their efforts to shock their audience through their hardcore sapphic ways is made more than clear and simply makes them look like desperate try-hards.

Although their anarchic image and band name are good for getting noticed, with titles as *shocking* as ‘No, I’m Married To Jesus. Now Keep Your Fucking Hands Off Him’, it’s disappointing how little the music backs up their attitude. The song should appear with sounds of blood-boiling angst, something that should be representative of dirty screaming infidels forced together in a small room, each movement and breath generating further cries of outrage. Yet it’s something more relatable to a bunch of 10 year olds playing an aggressive game of ‘it’ in a school playground. To put it lightly, they’ve got the balls and they’ve got the swag…but that’s pretty much about it.

Gay For Johnny Depp have been labelled with the dubious tag of “spazz-core” and although the frenzied riffs and chaotic wails aren’t something that’s to leave you with pounding and bloodied ears, it’s something that may suit the avid hardcore listener and Locust fan. Perhaps the reason as to why you should listen to this album is rightly put in Leapord’s words: “I’m not an idiot / I’m not an idiot! / I’m not a fucking douchebag!’” …I wonder why he feels the need to voice that.
(PUBLISHED ON TLOBF)