Death Grips - Government Plates (2013)

Supposedly the vinyl edition of the album came with a real license plate! If only I could get that, rob a bank with my trusted buddies (their names being Franklin, Michael, and Trevor) and speed away with that as my license plate, maybe the police would actually arrest Death Grips instead!! If you didn't catch that, those are video game characters. I don't have any actual fucking friends.

This was released out-of-the-blue much like "No Glove Deep Bread", a concept album about Lil Caesars forcing their employees to make Deep Dish pizzas, with MC Ride screaming every time his character had to pull a pizza out of the oven with no proper way of protecting his hands from getting third-degree burns, and wouldn't you know it: Since he was recovering from those third-degree burns from every teenage alcoholic's favorite pizza joint, the band decided to record this album and hardly even feature him on it! Instead of being all "YO YO YO RIPPITY-RAP" like he normally is, he's -mostly- been replaced by hard-hitting instrumentals, but in a kind of unique way.

See, one thing Devin Townsend aimed for with the release of "Addicted!" in 2009 was an industrial feel to the music, which we all know Death Grips flirts with, and the way he did that was by recording a guitar riff, and instead of actually playing through the songs while recording them, he'd simply just record himself playing a riff once and then copy and paste it throughout the track, giving it almost a robotic, pixel-perfect feeling to it. Even though MC Ride does normally rap on this album a little bit, the band mostly tries to go for the same feeling by sampling him, and repeating short little vocal performances by him, such as a repeating hook over and over with no or very limited verses, while the instrumental is the main driving point from the song from point A to point B.

The album opens up with possibly the greatest intro to a Death Grips album ever: A glass breaking, a loud siren kicking in, MC Ride screaming out lyrics, then a loud scream comes in (possibly by Zach Hill?) and a HEAVY AS SHIT synth starts kicking in while the drums pound, and before you know it, the opening track "You might think he loves you for your money but I know what he really loves you for it's your brand new leopard skin pillbox hat" is gone, and then the INCREDIBLE "Anne Bonny" kicks in, and this song is AGGRESSIVE AS SHIT!! The part where the drums become loud as shit (this entire paragraph can be described as "[adjective] as shit") is amazing!! It's only perfect that it's complimented in a triple-hit knock out by "Two Heavens", with pounding, almost military-like drums during the chorus, and my personal favorite Death Grips lyric of "Two Heavens is all I know" referring to life on earth being a complete nightmare, and even Hell seeming like Heaven in comparison.

That being said.. The album doesn't really pick up much after the first three songs. Sure, you have the hectic "This is Violence Now (Don't Get Me Wrong)" and the arguable-classic of "Birds" featuring none other than Rob Pattinson of "Twilight" fame on guitar (?!), but the rest of the album suffers from a lack of MC Ride, and even then, the songs in the latter half feel interchangeable to me, with no real focus other than to make some weird noises for a minute or two and head out. The latter half of the album pales in comparison to the first half (well, really, half of the first half) and feels almost like they really should've just issued the first three or five songs as an EP, because the latter half drags on a fair bit without no real rhyme or reason to it.

Death Grips?! More like DOODOO GRIPS BECAUSE THEY'RE POOP!!!!!!!!!!!!

6/10
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Feel free to check out the song previews/buy this album using my Amazon Associate link!