2014-08-23

XKCD Isn't Funny - #1411 - LOOP




















Hi! I'm Mark Prindle, coming out of retirement just to review the new release by Loop, my favorite shoegaze/fuzz rock band aside from My Bloody Valentine, The Boo Radleys, Slowdive, M83, Jesu, and Kitchens of Distinction.

Now, I was a bit weirded out when I found out that instead of releasing another lovely record full of fuzzed out rockers and mesmerizing feedback, our seventh-favorite shoegazers had decided to create an album that was just a single piece of paper that some fag kid named Craig told me to review.

Oh, haha, silly me! It turns out that according to wiki "I know everything" pedia, Loop has actually been an alternative rock band all along! So scrape those last two paragraphs from your memories, kiddies!!!... Scrape 'em!! with a flat edge razor and a needle, you fuckin junkie.

Loop's newest album, XKCD, is just a comic, with no music or way of getting music out of it, unless you wave the paper its printed on around in the air really fast,. Here, I'll show you: flplfpflfplfplfpppp

and so I was all set up to give this a one when I realized you're supposed to make your own music, by laughing at the joke portrayed on the album!……………………………..

………….Which is a pretty retarded idea, considering the joke sucks. What kind of loser tosspot would draw this? Back when I was in high school and listening to The Romones and that band that made Pink Flag and then got crap, I'd beat up twenty nerds like this in an hour!

Are we expected to identify with this pisshead? This guy that can't make his way through a news article in the fortnight of Ferguson, Gaza, and the destruction of games journalism? The guy that can't entertain himself with a smartphone, one of the most advanced developments of human accomplishment? The guy that doesn't fucking do something else when he's bored?

Maybe we're supposed to laugh at him, and I can't decide if that's less funny or not. Laughing at this guy would be like laughing at an incomplete being, unfinished, a sketch of a person. a husk, filled with cheetos, and caked with semen. The stick figure is worthy and deserving only of our pity, and then, not even that.

In short, this album sucks more dick than Zoe Quinn.



Buy Loop albums over here, or from your local library. But don't buy this one 'cause it sucks.

Back to Mark Prindle's astonashing circus.



[EDIT - 2019]
Well, that was dated. I feel really weird about this being my most viewed review (although let's be honest that's almost certainly just because it has so many buzzwords jammed into it). It's definitely not my best work. I don't even know what I was going for with some of it - I've got no idea who Zoe Quinn is, but she sounds like someone who's completely irrelevant to any possible conversation you could think of!

This is definitely not the tribute Mark Prindle deserves either, he's way funnier than this. (I'm still pretty proud of the fllpflfplpp joke though) I totally got his persona wrong, I tried for "irreverent and casual" and somehow mostly ended up with "asshole jock".

Really the main problem with this comic is the single-panel presentation. The guy as presented is sedimentary and boring - all setup, no payoff. The loop only becomes funny when it's broken, when the guy pulls out his ipod nano or whatever and realizes he can't access the Internet. So I'm raising the score from 1/10 to 3/10. There's a joke here, but it's buried and killed by the delivery and presentation.

I've also got no clue if the "Romones" typo was intentional or not.

[EDIT - 2023]
Chriiiiiiiiist this is embarrassing. Make no mistake, I've made plenty of fuckups in my life, but supporting the gamergate harassment campaign has to be in the top ten. Really fuckin sucks that I couldn't just sack up and admit my failure in the first edit, too. "Zoe Quinn sounds completely irrelevant" fuck off, me-from-2019, you knew better than that. That was 100% something I came up with in like, 2015 and then never bothered to second-guess. Ugh. 

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