Fashion Week as a release is the first Death Grips album to not feature MC Ride’s bitter howls cutting through the music, and this noticeable absence leaves for a release of pure electronic instrumental hip hop. Featuring an assortment of tunes with individual tracks drawing from differing styles and moods, riddled with intense drumming on Zach Hill’s part, the album does well to keep an emphasis on staying unique on a track by track basis while still mimicking a high level of electronic prowess not dissimilar from the band’s first studio album, The Money Store. However, the unfortunate issue with Fashion Week is that the release itself suffers from being a safer, less experimental release than previous albums and therefore seems to betray the band’s past work and in many ways what the band represents as a creative entity.
Fashion Week comes strong with mixed moods and sounds conveyed by an equally wide range of synths and instruments being featured over the course of the 14-track album. The sounds dance between sounds such as alien, militant, chirpy, electric screams an even through to grunge rock in places amongst many other styles, with warping contortion in the synths and blowout drum work.
While all these tracks are interesting in their variation, it all still feels like something heard at a DJ set rather than a Death Grips album – this could be due to the lack of vocals, or the lack of any moments that feel absolutely chaotic. Fashion Week has all the hallmarks of a decent electronic album in that the tracks still evoke enough to make a person want to move, but unfortunately there’s nothing that challenges a listener. The challenges lie in the questions that the release poses – the album’s release comes seemingly out of the blue after the band has disbanded, the end of each song forms an acrostic spelling reading out JENNY DEATH WHEN, and there’s no MC Ride – and while this speculation is all well and good enough, the fact stands that the music itself isn’t as daring as the questions it poses.
BY THOMAS BRAND
