GFOTY - VIPOTY

  • Share
  • GFOTY's VIPOTY is a four-track EP, a web portal, a short film, an app and a precursor to her European tour with Animal Collective. In the middle of all this sits a love story, an extreme imagining of 21st century digi-lust with an unhappy ending. It fleshes out the GFOTY character, a manifestation of consumerist culture at its most vacuous, with a dollop of Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim's absurdist humour squeezed on top. But will anyone outside of PC Music devotees be interested in this stuff? Until now, GFOTY has, musically speaking, represented a side of the label that I'd guess many people can get on board with. "Don't Wanna / Let's Do It," "LOVER" and "USA" captured the best aspects of PC Music's demented style, but on VIPOTY we get just get a bit of this inventiveness, as the focus is ceded to the project's wider aims. "All The Love I Had," a sort of looser ballad, is in the vein of GFOTY's covers of Céline Dion and Toni Braxton. It establishes the EP's bunny-boiler tone: "If I had a chance to make a tiny wish / I would be for all the other girls to die / And let me get by on my fucking own." "Got My Chad" is also a slow one, notable for its dry drum and vocal treatments and the chorus: "Finally I'm not a slag now that I have got my Chad." On "Amazing" and "Poison," we get some of the old GFOTY madness. Parts of "Amazing" are the EP's most abstract but they best express the theme of blind jealousy: as maniacal synth blasts are chained to the kick drum and clipped vocals—"You're amazing!"—you can sympathise with what she's going through. "Poison" is stylistically scattershot, toggling through scuzzy hip-hop, pop punk, noise and harp passages, and culminating with an angry swarm of vocals and synths stabs. It's all harmless fun. But even when these tracks explore the distinctive compositional ideas that have defined GFOTY until now, they don't stick long in the memory.
  • Tracklist
      01. All The Love I Had 02. Amazing 03. Got My Chad 04. Poison
RA