The Best Record I’ve Heard All Year is a 4-Hour Cross-Genre Record About Kevin from Ed Edd ’n’ Eddy
Bandcamp has been such an indispensable tool for underground music consumption in the internet era. Of course, things like SoundCloud, YouTube and even Grooveshark (RIP) all predated the service. However, there is something quite bold and definite about the “Bandcamp aesthetic.” The ease of use, social integration, and the “pay what you want” DIY nature of many artists on the site make it stand out from other streaming services. Bandcamp is a safe haven for the truly bizarre and experimental. Which is why when I was informed of a 4-hour, cross-genre concept record about Kevin from Ed Edd n Eddy, I knew there was only one place I would find it.
Kevin and the Bikes is a novelty/experimental music duo, and Dorkcore 101, their sophomore and presumably final album, has been one of the strangest musical discoveries I’ve found in quite some time. I don’t know much about the band’s members beyond that one of them has been in nearly a dozen indie bands across the North Carolina scene. But like many of the best pieces of outsider art, the mystery of the creative process is part of the appeal. It’s also a significant benefit in the process of writing this piece. The nearly 4-hour record covers so much musical ground that even planning a basic outline for discussing it is overwhelming. If I had to include the external factors of the members, this would probably be another unfinished musical editorial to clutter up my writing files. Luckily for me, the experience of listening to Dorkcore 101 was so enticing I felt almost morally obligated to report about it.
The thing to understand about Dorkcore 101 is that it’s mostly quite bad. Some would even say unlistenable (including the creators themselves.) But the erratic nature of the music, both in quality and in genre, makes it a surprisingly enticing listen. Opening track “Good Family Values” is a somewhat reliable indicator for the madness that’s about to ensue. The tune is a lo-fi acoustic romp, and one of many that echoes Guided by Voices. However, don’t take that to assume the track is a calming, reflective piece of saccharine joy. The lyrics, almost certainly improvised, contain excessive swearing and violent imagery. The members constantly interrupt themselves with their own laughter. The whole thing is waterlogged by irony, which is a tool that manages to keep the erratic musical changes across Dorkcore 101 relatively at ease with one another.
Comparing tracks 4 and 5, two personal favorite of mine, is a good indicator of how genre-bending this record gets. The former, “N-E-E-D-L-L-L-L-L-E-L-L-E-L-E-S-S-L-E-S,” is a pseudo-hardcore track, with vocals that rotate between guttural amphibian-like dribbles and high-pitched screams, are constantly clipping and are rough to sit through. The guitar riff is crude, and the drumming is often out of time. The main hook of the song is that neither member is correctly spelling the word needles, and are intentionally trying to make the other laugh, to great success.
Immediately after comes “Burdy Dorky,” a parody of Weezer’s iconic “Buddy Holly.” The vocals are so washed out they’re hard to hear, and the guitar riff attempting to recreate the little blip of synth in the original is one of the biggest laughs of the entire record. The lyrics are again improvised, with the main singer clearly at a loss of Kevin-related iconography to pull from. Both of these tracks, by any real standard of quality, are horrible. But the jokesters behind Kevin and the Bikes are aware of this, and use it to their advantage.
Self-awareness is not a get out of jail free card to excuse bad art. Take, for example, the cynical self-awareness of the Sharknado films. Sharknado is a series made by The Asylum, a company previously best known for ripoff DVDs designed for confused grandmas to buy for their inevitably disappointed grandchildren. The “bad on purpose” aesthetic of the Sharknado movies is boring. The Asylum leans into their movies being trite garbage to make a profit, laughing at people too cheerful to see into this. But that’s not the same self-awareness as Kevin and the Bikes. The duo knows their music is bad, but they’re having fun with it. The record is clearly an inside joke, put on Bandcamp for free for an audience of irony-poisoned millennials in NAILS shirts who are in on it. And really, the journey of two friends playing music dedicated to a show they clearly love was enough for me to stay onboard with the record from start to finish.
If the aesthetic of the music doesn’t make this clear enough, there are 5 episodes of the “Kevin Podcast” within the record to shine a light directly on the creative process. None of these episodes really discuss the show or the record; it’s all based around the two members, sometimes with a guest, calling each other names, calling their own record bad, and getting off-topic constantly. These fourth-wall breaks make the listening experience to Dorkcore 101 feel even more intimate, and give the detached slacker aesthetic a weirdly sincere feeling to it.
There are too many subgenres tackled on Dorkcore 101 to even name. “I Can’t Find My Hat” is a brutal burst of grindcore, with an aggressive drum beat and lyrics about, well, the location of a hat being unclear. “Why Are There No Minorities On This Fucking Show?” is an instrumental plunderphonics track, with some clever misdirection from not one, but two samples of folk-punk titans Against Me! at the beginning. “Kevin” is a parody of Ritchie Valens’ “Donna,” except, you guessed it, about Kevin. Tracks 86 and 87 are parodies of Jeromes Dream and Orchid, two screamo/powerviolence acts who put out a legendary split, known for its iconic skull-shaped vinyl. The full name of track 87, by the way? “The Eds Haven’t Been Trying to Buy Actual Jawbreakers This Whole Time, They’ve Been Trying to Buy Records From the 1990s Emo Band “Jawbreaker” But They’re Too Dumb to Realize That A CD Doesn’t Cost 25 FUCKING CENTS.” Look on Bandcamp if you don’t believe me.
Interestingly, if you do actually visit their Bandcamp page, K&TB state that the album becomes listenable at track 83. That track, a horrifying spoken word/ambient piece, is the beginning of a noticeable uptick in the quality of the recording and songwriting of the record. While the threadbare connections to a children’s cartoon and the nonchalant sense of humor remain, it feels like an almost entirely different record. In addition to the extremely accurate Jeromes Dream/Orchid parodies, there are forays into space rock, country rock, and psychedelia. There are also continued forays into hardcore punk and vaporwave, which had been touched upon in various ways in the preceding dozens of tracks. “I Fucking Hate My Friends, They Don’t Understand My Love for the Eds” sounds like a demo of a late-era Piebald song, and “Dedorkinization” gives off echoes of Sun Kil Moon. Safe to say, the home stretch of this record is pretty damn ambitious.
The final track, “Kevin Moves out of Peach Creek,” is a harrowing and emotional conclusion. In my notes while listening to this song, I wrote down “The Cure, Jawbreaker, A Clockwork Orange, Earthbound, and euphoria in general.” It blew my mind that a song that bookmarks an album I listened to as a joke could actually move me to some degree. It’s a well put-together track, from the slowcore build-up to the soupy synths that bring the track, and the album, to a close.
It might be easy to think that if you were interested in hearing this record in full, you would skip to track 83 and spare yourself the laughably bad songs, filler, podcasts and skits. But to skip the trek into this album’s home stretch is like flying onto the top of Mount Everest and saying you climbed it. The last hour of this record is the treat one is rewarded for listening to the first three. It must be stated that the first three hours are legitimately entertaining, and I could find at least one thing about every track that stood out to me, whether it be ridiculous lyrics, a good riff or a badass synth tone. Some of the most entertaining songs I’ve heard all year are hidden within goofy chiptune interludes and fuzzy Elephant 6 worship. Some of the best tracks ARE the goofy chiptune interludes and fuzzy Elephant 6 worship.
Is it a stretch to call Dorkcore 101 a good album? Possibly, when so much of it is bad. But it is a good experience. Just the fact that 101 songs across at least a dozen genres, all revolving around a cult classic cartoon, exists to be listened to should gnaw at your curiosity. A clear drive and passion went into the crafting of this record, and even when it misses the mark, it does so with a sly wink from one musical troll to the other, sitting on the floor of the same bedroom together.
Besides, studio perfection is for dorks.
Dorkcore 101 is available for free download here. If you like my writing, you can pay me for that here.
