Neil Cicierega's new mash-up odyssey, Mouth Dreams, is so stupid, and so good
It’s been a good time for recurring Actual Good Internet Content lately; fresh off the latest arrival of September 21, we’ve just received the latest installment of Neil Cicierega’s Mouth series of mash-up albums, the comedian’s long-running project to create the same effect on the human brain that you usually see when someone reads the wrong book in a Lovecraft novel, except via elaborately sequenced samples from Smash Mouth albums, instead. Cicierega released Mouth Dreams—the follow-up to Mouth Sounds, Mouth Silence, and Mouth Moods—yesterday, and the internet has spent the last 24 hours processing everything that happens in the hour-plus release, from shockingly listenable mash-ups of Talking Heads and MC Hammer, The Pixies and Fountains Of Wayne, and Aerosmith and Foo Fighters, to a full-on Rickroll, to the moment in the album’s extro when “All Star” finally rears its inevitable, more-sinister-than-ever head.
For the sake of our own sanity, if nothing else, we wanted to take a minute to dig into the most wonderfully dumb song on the entire album—although technically it’s two songs, since tracks 13 and 14, “Fredhammer” and “Limp Wicket,” both share a single unifying sound: Limp Bizkit’s ode to heartbreak, “Nookie”. Durst et al.’s musical handiwork is interpreted through two different lenses (starting at 28:47 if you’re listening to the full SoundCloud upload of the album, rather than downloading the tracks from Cicierega’s web site): First, via Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” and then through the “Ewok Celebration Song” from The Return Of The Jedi. (Yes, as in “Yub Nub!”)
