The Batlord

Over the last few years I've rediscovered and grown my love of ICP from back when I was 22, but Jeckel Brothers has been hit or miss for me. No longer. The past months have seen it growing on me more and more, and now it's been bumpin' for days solid and I have yet one more ICP album to add to the ever growing pile (of ****) of their records that I consider some of my favorite albums ever.

The more atmospheric, theatrical tracks like "Play with Me", "Mad Professor", and "I Want My Shit", are the ones that kept me coming back when I was new to the album and still grab me the most, as they perfectly express the group's gloriously overblown silliness ("Mad Professor" might just be the quintessential ICP song).

But you got "Fuck the World", one of the few times anything approaching nu metal actually works, with that immense ****ing chorus and some of the best lyrics this side of Dylan: "**** your mom, **** your mom's momma, **** the Beastie Boys and the Dalai Lama!" Marvellous. Then there's "Another Love Song", a song about decapitating a cheatin' skank-ho, set to the most sensitive of acoustic guitar ballads, and it's also catchy as all ****ing ****.

And what about that song with a certainly crack-addled ODB (yeah, that ODB) ranting about "bitches" and naming names: "I don't give a **** bitch! I will kill you! You, Shaqueeta! You, Belinda! You too, Passion! Bitch!" Supposedly ODB sent the group a completely unusable series of rants about women that weren't even on beat and they had to piece together what scant lines they good. I guess smarter artists would have just chocked it up to a loss, but ICP paid thirty grand for an ODB feature gosh durn it, and they'd be ****ed if they were gonna let all that potential Faygo go to waste. And thank the Wraith they did cause it's awesome.

Mike E. Clark's production is as always a highlight, and possibly the highlight, as it's dense, busy, original, and highly atmospheric, but without being overbearing. Odd sounds that you don't hear on anything but an ICP album abound, and the wall of sound is as always as infectious as it is strange. The man absolutely knows how to bring out the best in Violent J and Shaggy, which is no mean feat since... they can't rap... yeah, and anyone else might not be up to the task. ICP are most definitely more than the sum of their parts, and the fulcrum of that machine is definitely Mike. J and Shaggy would be potentially great on their own, but without Mike they might well have never risen above their grimy roots to be the oddball, pop rap savants that they've grown into. To be perfectly honest if any non-fan is going to connect with any single aspect of an Insane Clown Posse album then it's going to be the production, as Mike E. Clark is clearly the most unironically talented and accomplished artist in the group and proves it time and time again.

It's not all good though. As with any ICP album it starts with one or two intros that can go on for WAY too long, and it's usually two on any album past their first two; the first is often spoken word and the second is musical, and both are almost always highly skippable after the first time you hear them. The Amazing Jeckel Brothers is no different, though as with the previous album, The Great Milenko, the Posse have upped their gratuitous intro game, so they're not so awful that you'll feel the absolute need to hit the skip button, and the second track is actually pretty nice. You also kinda need that **** to get the concept of whatever Joker's Card, Dark Carnival character the album is introducing, so I'll never say that the intros should have been left off, just that they could be shorter. Unless you're a diehard then you don't need these, but as for me... I need them sometimes. Just not most of the time. On the other hand, just in the service of full disclosure, even if ICP intros aren't generally the high point of the album, they do tend to make the beginning of the album feel like an event rather than just being the tacked on garbage that many pointless rap album intros are, and that's really what the Wicked Clowns are all about (events, not tacked on garbage... although they're about that too tbh), so it's all good as far as this goon is concerned.

A bit more unforgivable is that the first proper track, "Bring It On" just isn't that great, leading me to start the album more often than not on track four, "Bring It On", but after that there's really only one dud on the album, "The Shaggy Show", with its phoned in Snoop Dogg feature (yeah, that Snoop Dogg) and general lameness. But I'd say 13-minutes of questionable material (only ten if you're being charitable to the intros, which any fan is going to be since we're just used to it) on an hour-and-nine-minute album isn't bad at all.

Those missteps aside, this album is fantastic and a wonderful addition to their surprisingly solid discography, but before we go I'd just like to discuss that one elephant in the room that so many people seem to be wrong-headed about: the lyrics. Are the Insane Clown Posse funny in a traditional sense? **** no. Their punchlines are lame and their obsession with juvenile nonsense is way more dumb than humorous in any sort of Kevin Smith sense. But they know that (or at least I think they do) and don't pretend to be the funniest dudes on earth. Their real schtick is being so committed to and self-aware about being lame, god damn retards that it transitions into actual absurdism in a way that's... I don't know... clever? Inventive? Oddly brilliant? And that **** cracks me the **** up, both ironically and not-so-ironically. I mean if you're gonna rep "Cold Ethyl" and "Billion Dollar Babies" or GWAR then what exactly is the difference, besides it being obvious that ICP actually are stupid human beings?

Sigh. I hate being defensive in a review but it's kind of hard to talk about Insane Clown Posse's pros without also addressing their supposed cons, since it's really the same conversation and needs to be discussed so long as you're all a bunch of stupid ****s. Well... in the words of "Everybody Rize", everybody jumps to the juggalo sound, **** out of here if you ain't Down with the Clown!

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