Otto Von Schirach

Maxipad Detention is every bit as uncomfortable as the name suggests. It might also be an early signifier that Mike Patton isn’t simply living on the edge, but that he’s actually gone completely insane. Or lazy, as he could just have been throwing darts at demos taped to the Ipecac dry-wall and ended up releasing an album from the cheating sex’s answer to Peaches. In Otto Von Schirach, lazy could be it, since the album’s press kit boasts 10,000 shows under the 28-year-old producer’s belt: you do the math. The thing is Peaches is attempting empowerment with what’s become a radical’s fad of reclaiming that which has been used to oppress. Samples like "Ow, you’re doing it too hard, fucking asshole” on "Maxipad Vegetation,” and lyrics like "In the club I just wanna tea-bag hoes” in "Tea Bagging the Dead,” though, don’t exactly lend a lot of pedagogical insight into sexual politics. In fact, "Detention” plays Von Schirach off as the perfect antithesis to Peaches’ subversive message. Whereas the fairer is mainstream club-oriented in her beats and song structures, Otto veers drunkenly towards the avant-garde without necessarily learning anything about it. Crafting spastic, disconnected instrumental orgies of pig noises, synth sweeps, and standard post-jungle/IDM fair, Von Schirach’s really trying hard to give Patton a stronghold on yet another genre’s hoard of perverted teenaged know-it-alls. The back cover warns of 2012’s prophesised Mayan apocalypse, but if our culture’s become this anti-social and ready, that’s six years too late.