In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1936 essay “The Crack-Up,” the writer describes a period in which his mind runs amok; he loses the desire to strive and socialize and withers into a sad-sack cynic. His main source of entertainment is list-making—football players, popular songs, suits he’s worn— and he becomes bitter about the most trivial things. He reflects that once upon a time, before the crack-up, he fancied it “a romantic business to be a successful literary man—you were not ever going to be as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived.” It must feel similar to be an experimental musician, nobly laboring to shatter the boundaries of sound, yet receiving minimal fanfare and being misconstrued by critics. Jack Callahan and Jeff Witscher’s debut joint record, Think Differently, unravels like a musical midlife crisis. It interrogates their careers and the experimental scene but also feels like a long improv sketch, a self-aware simulation of two avant-gardists losing their head and going pop. Call it SoundClown performance art.
Think Differently’s hyper-eclectic pulp-rock and quivering Auto-Tune hooks will startle anyone who’s only familiar with their stim-board sound collages. Take Callahan’s Trap Studies, which rewired Zaytoven and Lex Luger shards into what sounds like an isolated FL Studio layer left on loop after the producer fell asleep. Witscher’s Twitch pooled audio from random streams into a frazzled info overload. The closest thing to Think Differently is their surreal 2023 performance “Bring The Flowers to the Theatre,” where they deadpanned on insular themes like review scores and delay effects and punctuated sentences with inane FX. It might be the only performance in history to include jokes about Ridgewood gentrification and also the “BABA BOOEY” groan.
The album plays out the same—sardonic and sincere skits about their lives as musicians constantly interrupted by puerile soundbites—but with a new layer of zany alt-rock and trip-hop. Instead of Fitzgerald writing lists of cavalry leaders and football players, the duo assembled a terabytes’ worth of meme effects. They seem to have deliberately chosen the most grating and overused sounds, perhaps to express their dread about the internet and cultural sterility. There’s a Roblox “oof” grunt, the Taco Bell bong, and “ohmaaagawd.” There’s an interpolation of Linkin Park’s “In the End”; one song deploys Masked Wolf’s infamously awful “Astronaut in the Ocean” as a riser. The opener is a spoken-word remix of “I miss the old Kanye,” but this time what’s pined for is music with “soul.” It lashes against the “Bandcamp bestowed,” “status quo,” “bar so low” music of today; there are vocals from AI versions of Mr. Krabs and Peter Griffin. Imagine a meme megamix for washed-up Redditors—it’s the kind of album that works best as fodder for Discord debates, not necessarily as a repeat listening experience.
