KYM Review: Neil Cicierega's Mouth Moods

ttention music memers: you probably have someone in your life outside of the Internet who would tell you to stay away from Neil Cicierega’s Mouth Moods because it’s a colossal avalanche of meme shit, but I am here to tell you that you should absolutely listen to Neil Cicierega’s Mouth Moods because it’s a colossal avalanche of meme shit. At first listen, it’s seemingly every pop song from the Seventies to the early Aughts that became an ironic gag mashed up together in bizarre harmony. From the opening track, "The Starting Line," Cicierega frankensteins a hodgepodge of lyrics that are as familiar to the common musical lexicon as "Mary Had a Little Lamb," from "this is a story of a girl" and “the world is a vampire” to “it’s been one week since you looked at me” and “I’VE GOT ANOTHER CONFESSION TO MAKE,” into a mashup that brilliantly outshines the sum of its parts. It’s all for kicks and giggles, until you start humming it. Then it's a jam.

In the world of online music, there are probably only a few internet-native artists who can measure up to the reputation and sensibilities of Neil Cicierega. The 30-year-old musician has been churning out viral hits for nearly two decades, beginning with his 2001 surrealist mashup video "Hyakugojyuuichi" and many other works of Flash animation, most notably Potter Puppet Pals and Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny, and Mouth Moods clearly reflects his proficiency in the craft of meticulously constructing a body of work that essentially amounts to a dumb joke. Mouth Moods is more than just a self-aware parade of meme-y pop songs; it is a series of deconstructions that digs at the heart of ironic appeal behind the late revival of seemingly random pop hits from bygone decades.

Take “AC/VC” over Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles,” one of the most iconic feminine pop anthems of the mid-2000s, Cicierega plays the vocals from “Back In Black.” Divorced from AC/DC’s cock-rock riffs, Brian Johnson’s vocal sounds goofily impotent. It’s a spit-take moment for sure, but once the laugh subsides, the thing starts to actually work. The combination of Johnson’s inhuman quacking and Carlton’s melodramatic piano pop illuminates just how emotionally--and effectively--manipulative the two songs are. Cicierega isn’t just taking the piss out of these cheesy pop songs; he’s also actively celebrating the ingredients that made them iconic.

This is Cicierega’s modus operandi for Mouth Moods. On nearly every track, he mixes two or more wildly different songs together so successfully that they end up sounding like perfect inverses of each other. This means that while the parts Cicierega employs may seem incongruous, when divorced from their sources, whatever commonality they share creates a fresh, modern sound. For example, you may not think Mungo Jerry’s “In the Summertime” and Korn’s “Freak on a Leash” have anything in common, but Jonathan Davis’ infamous nu-metal beatboxing over Jerry’s upbeat southern shuffle wouldn’t sound all that out of place in a hip jazz-fusion club. Save for “Bustin” and “Tiger,” a pair of self-contained remixes which Cicierega makes about ejaculation and tigers, respectively, Mouth Moods is a showcase of buried connections between pop songs, which makes it deliciously sweet for the pop culture student.

The most immediate comparison for Cicierega’s Mouth album project would be the work of Girl Talk, another Internet-approved DJ who rose to viral fame in 2010 with lulzy mashups of pop songs. But whereas Girl Talk more consciously winks to music obsessives, Cicierega’s audience is more like me, and maybe, since you’ve made it to paragraph five on a Know Your Meme Dot Com album review, more like you: a meme dork who has leaned so far into “ironic” enjoyment of songs like Santana's “Smooth”, Smash Mouth's "All Star" and “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies that you can no longer tell if your enjoyment is ironic or sincere anymore. Likely, you don’t care. The silly one-hit-wonders and throwbacks that Cicierega samples in Mouth Moods are as much a part of your musical DNA as anything you’d perhaps be more proud to listen to.

Cicierega's latest album, more than anything, is a celebration of these goofy songs, these memes that still get radio play on soft rock stations. When Cicierega finally drops the album’s “All Star” mix after teasing it for 18 tracks, he does so, it seems, with all the gusto and pride of a classic rock band playing their biggest hit at the end of the night. Buoyed by the instrumental of Queen’s “Under Pressure,” “Mouth Pressure” is joyful, and weirdly, emotionally powerful in a way Smash Mouth never intended and Queen would probably hate. That middle ground between high art and meme trash is where Cicierega resides, effectively and effortlessly pulling from both to celebrate decades of pop culture falling into the hands of ironists.