By It’s our Bandcamp Pick of the Week, featuring 300SkullsAndCounting & Jenny Sparks’s growingly viral crunkcore lightning in a bottle album THIS IS SPA TOWN!
300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks – THIS IS SPA TOWN!
Genre: Bassline, Indietronica, Crunkcore
Favorite Tracks: “Kill You in the Bace,” “The Ballad of St. Nick’s Park,” “Can of K”
Just as the beat dropped on “Can of K,” I realized that for the first time in a long time, I was feeling alive. A fidgeting, kaleidoscopic mush-pot of influence is now so going-rate among the musically online that the reference is blasé, but the wise adults among us will still sagely nod: “Ah, yes … 1000 GECS.” THIS IS SPA TOWN! is deliriously fun, the perfect torch-bearer for Laura and Dylan’s firm belief in taking goofiness seriously. That the roughness of its edges occasionally makes itself clear is all the more in service of selling its inextricable sense of popping off with your pals, carrying a certain roguish, grinning abandon over the finish line in perfect lock-step with its bedroom bona fides. Picking up the ball the gecs dropped by not capitalizing on the ear-razing dalliances of their Square Garden set, 300SkullsAndCounting and Jenny Sparks’ lens is fundamentally British, bassline junkies, Enter Shikari, liquid undulations of OG dubstep, and the sass-predicated members of the Holy Roar Records roster all crammed in like sardines.
When THIS IS SPA TOWN! is at its peak, it’s transcendent (“The Ballad of St. Nick’s Park,” “Can of K”). When it’s off … it can admittedly suck a little bit (“100% Legal Intro,” “Are Mum’s”). But it’s a life-affirming bottle of lightning either way, Cutting Pink With Knives if they loved Dizzee Rascal, CHRONO TRIGGER OST, and taking the piss. As far as that unique tonal balance is concerned, THIS IS SPA TOWN! is thankfully clever and humorous while only occasionally dipping into overdoses of fabricated Hot Topic cringe (one too many references to zombies and sharks and the like for this chopped unc). The anthemic recitation of, “I never thought I’d be 25 chuckin’ rocks in a bin with a fan on Campion Hill / Never thought I’d be in Westham with a guy that makes sounds like *kindercore synth bleats*, but still / I came a long way since King Krule phase, Rough Trade tote bag, and a shit fucking grill / But nothing really changes apart from nowadays I’ll be screaming” on “The Ballad of St. Nick’s Park” is kind of the proof of concept there. But the beef with a sound guy on “Kill You in the Bace” will hit home for anyone who’s thrown a live event with music, and the regular vocal interjections and asides virtually always hit a perfect stride of amiable self-ribbing; it brings to mind a less-rawr-xD Food House (complimentary).
THIS IS SPA TOWN! made me feel nostalgic while pushing the game forward on its own merits: It made me miss feeling like life was ahead of me, that doors were opening and not closing, that the day-to-day was filled with electricity in every nook and cranny. It’s not perfect, but there are several moments where it gets pretty damn close, and it’s so true to itself and its creators’ vision that it’s the rare outing where the occasional misstep is genuinely endearing. I’d probably give my kingdom to get a chance to rip donuts in my high school parking lot, the passenger princess in my friend’s dogass red pickup truck, blowing the speakers to tattered shreds, THIS IS SPA TOWN! pissing off everyone in the remote vicinity. With that considered, the fact that all of the kids 300SkullsAndCounting shouts out on “The Ballad of St. Nick’s Park” seem to literally just be his besties almost brings a tear to my eye. Check it out on Bandcamp.
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