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5 hours ago
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The best album I’ve heard so far this year isn’t from this year at all. It’s from 2015 (though its recordings were made decades before that), and is a collection of sludgy, doomy covers of late-70s punk, new wave and pop perennials: My Sharona, Call Me, Walk Like an Egyptian. The guitars on this mysterious tribute album have had their pitch tuned down to a low, thick squelch, the drum beats are slow and punishingly thudding, and the vocals, while sung in a sweet tenor, have a strange, almost lobotomised quality to them. The weirdest thing of all though is who is performing: Alvin, Simon, Theodore.
OK, let’s explain. Just over 10 years ago, Canadian musician Brian Borcherdt – best known as one half of experimental noise duo Holy Fuck – bought an old 16rpm turntable, designed for playing slow-speed records such as spoken-word albums. Naturally, Borcherdt immediately started messing about with it, playing normal 45rpm records on the turntable, which slowed them to a disorienting crawl. After experimenting with slowing down a few LPs, he landed on his masterwork: the Chipmunks album Chipmunk Punk, a cynical 1980 attempt by the creators of the squeaky-voiced cartoon rodents to capitalise on the ascendant musical genre of the moment, while of course not sounding the slightest bit punk at all.
When played at 16rpm, the album’s high, pitch-shifted vocals are returned to something like the register they were recorded in, but the instruments, which weren’t shifted to a higher pitch like the vocals, become glacially, gelatinously slow. Borcherdt captured some of Chipmunk Punk’s slowed-down tracks, along with other Chipmunk covers and originals, and whacked a couple of volumes of compilations on SoundCloud (and later Bandcamp) under the project name Chipmunks on 16 Speed, a groan-worthy pun on the 00s electroclash group Chicks on Speed. In the decade or so since, the project has attained cult status, periodically going viral on TikTok and Twitter (which is where I encountered it), and amassing a small army of fans who, in YouTube and Reddit comments, reimagine the Chipmunks as doomed, hell-raising rock stars. (“RIP Alvin. Saw him live only once. Cleveland, 81. Will never forget that sound. So young. Full of piss and vinegar.”)
Listening to Chipmunks on 16 Speed, you can understand the adoration. In their decelerated form, the songs are both menacing and beguiling in a manner their original performers could never have anticipated. At points, things get genuinely gnarly – doom metal bands have spent decades fruitlessly seeking a guitar tone as nasty as the one heard on the cover of Pat Benatar’s Heartbreaker. But there’s also a haunted, found-in-an-old-tape-deck quality to the songs that reminds me of Cindy Lee’s great 2024 album Diamond Jubilee, or Panda Bear at his most spectral. At points they are disarmingly beautiful: Heaven is a Place On Earth transformed into a Beach Boys spiritual; the chorus of Jessie’s Girl emerging from the sludge in a sunburst of harmony.
Slowing music down certainly isn’t a new phenomenon: in the early 2010s there was a vogue for stretching out tracks by the likes of Justin Bieber to 10 or 20 times their length, transforming them into ambient soundscapes. (For a while my go-to focus music in the office was the Jurassic Park theme slowed down by 1000% percent – try it, it really works!) While those versions maintained the songs’ original pitches, they were superseded later in the decade by “slowed + reverb”, an internet microgenre that slows down the rpm of rap and R&B tracks, deepening the vocals in the process, and adding lashings of reverb to the mix, which gives the songs a woozy and slightly mournful quality.
It’s a trend that has proved remarkably enduring, not to mention wide-reaching – anyone with a passing interest in football, for example, will have almost certainly encountered a “slowed + reverb” remix via a compilation clip of a known “baller”. “Slowed + reverb” has run in parallel with the also unkillable, though by now very tired, trope of soundtracking movie trailers with sad, slowed-down versions of usually upbeat songs. Just a few days ago, Warner Bros released the teaser for their new DC superhero horror movie Clayface, set to a glum reimagining of – of all things – The Flaming Lips’ Do You Realize??.
So what’s the appeal of this molasses-slow music? By reducing songs to a crawl, these reimaginings seem to capture something: a sort of woozy, alienating, downbeat register that feels both a reflection on, and rejection of, our overstimulated age. An achievement I’m guessing the Chipmunks and their session musicians weren’t aiming for when they sat down to make some cash-in covers of pop hits more than 40 years ago.
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