2 out of 5

Label: self-released (?)

Produced by: ?

People – digital music can disappear! And, like, I don’t just mean in the sense that you don’t “own” it, though yes, but also – Totally Anonymous’ ‘Tot Anon’ joins a small group of things I picked up digitally that I can no longer track down any source of online. They’re already hard to find info on – I can just make assumptions based on their having released on Fuck’s supermegacorporation label – and now I own this album that I can’t see if there’s any explanatory blurbs about, or point you to a place to check it out on your own. I’m happy I “own” it, even if I don’t think it’s super great overall, but I’m also always a little bummed when stuff like this just goes -whoosh- from the internet.

I suppose that adds some mystique to the total lo-fi ear fuck that is Totally Anonymous – perhaps a drum machine and toy instrumentation, or maybe a guitar, lots of tape manipulation, drunken / stoned singing – but it’d also be fun to just know who was in this group, and be able to send them a message akin to: “that was weird.”

Similar to Santa’s Whispers, this album is a thin jangle of pop sketches, half-sung / half-spoken / half-chattered by what sounds like a female vocalist, and then butchered into non-song format most of the time via effing with the recording – looping, playing it back, chopping up the beat… anything to make it as humorously unpalatable as possible. On the first go-round, even with the other album in my rearview, I really struggled to find the musicality, and was thinking it was best to view this as strictly experimental stuff instead of, like, songs. After a fashion, though, I did come to quite like the loose, sing-songy nature of the album’s first half, which wanders in and out of a fair amount of pleasant melodies and then interstitials or stitching that’s comprised of noise, or our creators just messing around with loops and whatnot. But the back half of the album… woof. TA starts going heavy on the ‘just fucking with you’ pill, to the point of purposeful obnoxiousness, and it starts to edge the needle towards Too Much; there’s not enough balance of actual song to rescue it.

If you can fully switch offer to just hearing this as a gag, then the dose of hummable tunes is probably a bonus. Wanting it to be more of latter – as Santa’s Whispers was – curses the prank-like nature of the recording to not seem all that entertaining.