There’s only one way to play this album and it’s loud as fuck.

At first you may not see the genius of this record. I sure as fuck didn’t. But that’s also part of its charm. This shit sounds like a record that was pasted together with elementary glue and plastic wrap in a drunken haze between the hours of three and four AM. Then someone else took over and made the recording sound crystal clear. This isn’t an album made to enlighten the minds of the upper class. In fact, it’s made to be a huge fucking turd in the aristocratic punch bowl. As soon as one listens close to this album, it opens up like a goddamn murder flower poisoning the motherfuckers pulling at the fucking strings of this thing we call society. The album cover tells you who this album is made for. It’s for the woman/man vacuuming the fucking hotel lobby for rich fucks who have no idea what life can throw at you. It’s for the forgotten majority. It’s for the “Dumbfounded, downtrodden and dejected. Crestfallen, grief-stricken and exhausted. Trapped in [their] room while the house [is] burnin’ to the motherfuckin’ ground.” As the first fucking line of the album says. 

Time to get pissed off at those who hold our goddamn chains, motherfuckers. 

Watching the news, eventually one comes across articles illustrating how huge corporations not only make billions of dollars, but they don’t even pay taxes on that shit. The rich can cheat and bend the rules while the rest of us who aren’t rich enough to bend the rules get repeatedly ass fucked. It’s fucking annoying. And also, it’s not fucking new. In fact, this message is so old you’re probably rolling your fucking eyes. “Ya,” you might say, “so society is corrupt. So fucking what?” Well, Jeff talks about this feeling to: “What’s the point of having a voice when it gets stuck in your throat?” Jeff’s not an idiot. In fact, in the closing lines of the first song you hear the phrase, “Et tu, USA.”

“What the fuck is this shit?” you might ask.

Well, “Et tu” means, “and you” in Latin. A line made famous by Shakespeare in his play Julius Caesar. It’s what Caesar says when he gets totally fucked over by Brutus at the end of the play. Caesar says to his once bestie, “Et tu, Brute?” when that motherfucker betrays him. Harsh, right? What’s great about Jeff is even if you didn’t read Shakespeare, or don’t understand the line’s history, phonetically it sounds like, “F U, USA” so that bitch still makes sense. That’s a hard thing to fucking write. This shit wasn’t written over a weekend. 

I could talk about the production, which is fucking great. I could also talk about the themes of cop shootings, the isolation of modern society, the idolatry and stupidity of celebrity praise, or the many other themes of this album, but I won’t. This shit is best explored. In the end, this album gives hope. It gives a hope against the fuckers cheating people who weren’t born rich and are just trying to get by. And it does it as loud as it fucking can. If you don’t believe me just read Jeff’s words on the last song of the record:

They can hang us out to dry
They can profit from their lies again
They can shake our souls
They can send us home, oh yeah

We’re not gonna let them win, oh no

This shit is fucking glorious.