Context – you guessed it

Morning work list-making extravaganza!  Just getting my things in order for the next couple of days, maybe weeks.  Time will tell, I still have no idea how long some of these things take.

Recommended by a friend, Neil Cicierega’s Mouth Moods is the third album by the comedian/mashup-artist.  And I think the comedian tag is important context for how this album should be approached, for without this would be little more than a less crowded, less dance-able rendition of Girl Talk.  Like Legion of Doom but without the focus on scene kids.

But more than once I laughed out loud while listening to this, particularly on “AC/VC”.  I’d tell you what the mashup is, but I think it’s better to discover organically.  The surprise is half the fun, although I’m willing to bet you can guess one of the artists included in the track from the title.  Oh that there were better points of reference for me to allude to!

The real gift of the album, for me at least, was not in it’s humor or Neil’s prowess as a mashup artist, but in reminding me how much I fucking love film scores.  There’s a mashup that includes the theme “Time” from Christopher Nolan’s Inception (shout out to Hans Zimmer), which I couldn’t place at first.  Discovering the track’s origin reminded me how much I love this movie, probably due in part to the magnificent score.

It also reminded me of the last time I spent any significant amount of time in a game store (think card games and board games more than video games) when a playlist of movie scores was playing in the background.  I had to go home and watch Jurassic Park just to get to the score at the end, which may go down as one of the best pieces of music humans ever create.  I can’t say for sure, considering my short time on this Earth, but Lord knows it’s good enough.

So thanks, Neil Cicierega, for reminding me how much I love Inception and for the laughs.  I will surely show this to 3 of my friends, but will most likely forget your name every time I do.  It is weird and hard to pronounce in my head, although I must admit I haven’t tried saying it out loud yet.

If you like Girl Talk but wished he wouldn’t use so much rap, Mouth Moods is for you.  If you like laughing at odd juxtapositions, Mouth Moods is for you.  If you want to quietly contemplate the vastness of the oceans and wonder why we haven’t explored that yet (seriously, what’s down there? Have we still only reached 10% of the knowable culture down there?  Don’t tell me merpeople don’t exist when we don’t know 90% of the ocean’s potential), then this probably won’t be for you.