“10,000 gecs”, the new album from 100 gecs is finally here, and has been duly recognised as the promised delivery of the second coming.
After the LA-based duo’s debut, 1,000 gecs, broke the internet after its release in 2019, the band was signed to the mighty Atlantic records, and the world waited to see just how disappointing their follow-up would be, now that they’d sold out to the man.
But no sooner was the album finished and ready to go, than the band ceremoniously binned it to begin it again from scratch. And now that, a lifetime later, their follow-up is finally here, the verdict is unanimous.
10,000 gecs is an epoch-defining snapshot of the zeitgeist that perfectly encapsulates the disposable nature of contemporary culture. By mining so catholic a landscape of musical influences with such bold irreverence, it triumphantly produces a new kind of universality.
The world and music will never be the same again. You know, the usual in terms of a measured critical response.
And the pair are playing their part to perfection, performing wall to all interviews with practiced insouciance, declaring their indifference to all media, including and especially social (“I’m actually not even on…” etc.) in perfectly formed sound bites precisely formulated for the very platforms they’ve so little interest in courting.
In fairness, it’s not their fault that they suddenly find themselves catapulted into the limelight. They have to find some way, I suppose, of dealing with all that, and this is probably as good a way as any.
But there’s a huge problem for a pair of musicologists who are as unabashedly serious in their study of all things sonic as gecs are. There’s very little terrain left to go searching in.
In the 80s and 90s, the 60s and 70s were trawled exhaustively by hip hop and rap artists for grooves and snatches of melody to sugar-coat their rage with. Then, in the oughts, DJs like Shadow and RJD2 mixed contemporary hip hop with whatever they could get their hands on from the 80s and 90s, as well as the 60s and 70s. While more recently, the likes of Daft Punk and Beyoncé went back to disco and to house in their original forms.
So anyone digging today is forced on to necessarily obscure terrain. The result is that, in between the glorious onslaught of thrash guitars, pop-punk, ska and auto-tuned vocals we get respectful nods in the direction of Limp Bizkit, Green Day, Primus and Ween.
Which gecs then feel duty-bound to insist is done in complete earnestness, and is utterly devoid of even a soupcon or smidgeon of irony.
It’s all incredibly clever, genuinely impressive and propulsively toe-tapping. And yet. To once again misquote Gertrude Stein, there’s very little there, there.
Instead of being able to balance the intellectual weight of their sonic architecture with the emotion inherent in a classic 60s, 70s, 80s, or 90s melody, they’re reduced to relying on musical referents that further bolster that intellectual heft. So it ends up being all brains and little in the way of heart or soul.
The result is an album that’s dazzling but un-engaging. Tellingly, despite coming in at barely 27 minutes, the album somehow overstays its welcome.
What it feels like more than anything else is an intermezzo. An enjoyable, indulgent novelty record, that the band can now put behind them to focus on something somewhat more substantial.
You can see the official video for 10,000 gecs’ Doritos & Fritos below:
Sign up for a subscription right or below, and I shall keep you posted every month, on All the very best and worst in film, televisions and music!
