Bored in Class - Midnight Brown Music Review!
By Pierce 5 Comments
Midnight Brown has a very distinctive sound. When I loaded their music onto my iTunes, they were auto-classified as "Emobilly". I would expand on that a little and call their music "Electronic Hillbilly". Songs like "Cat Belt Buckle", "President of the Mall" and "Let's Do It (Undercover)" are akin to early 80's pop groups like Depeche Mode, Erasure, or early Moby. But that doesn't mean their music is bad - on the contrary, their simple electronic riffs lend to their light-hearted lyrical content and add to that distinct "yeah, we cooked this up on our own on the side, y'see?" sound.
Another aspect of Midnight Brown's music is the vocal and lyrical styling of Jeff and Chris. There are apparent hip-hop influences in their vocals here - lots of spoken word ("2084", "Call 'em Like You See 'em", "28 Hours a Day") and rapping ("Hey Piper", "In Panama", "Gravyrobbers") on their tracks. That shouldn't surprise us, considering Gerstmann's hip-hop upbringing. And some tracks are sung, of course.
Emotionally, topically, Midnight Brown is all over the place. Where groups like Ice-T will rap about hanging out with his posse and defying the police, or Depeche Mode with relationships and emo, Midnight Brown pretty much does their own thing. In fact, the only other group I can think of similar to MB's off-the-wall topics and lyrics is the rap artist known as Kool Keith (pretty much any Kool Keith album, but you can check out his spacey "Black Elvis" album for a good sampling). "Gravyrobbers" has the two singing/rapping about going around town, stealing gravy. "President of the Mall" is about how they would run a mall (with an excellent impression of ex-presidential runner Howard Dean). "2084" is a "what-if" scenario of daredevil Evel Knievel coming back from future timetravel to discuss events of the era 2084. You can expect pretty much all these songs to treat the subject matter of their title.
Right now I'm rockin' Midnight Brown out on my iPod and askin' my friends if they've ever heard of 'em. All of them have said "No", but maybe that'll change within the decade. I wonder if they do parties...
Fun Facts
- Kool Keith has worked with Ice-T under the group name Analog Brothers.