Ah yes, it’s that time again. Time for a release crawling up from the depths of what is undeniably the most dramatic and argued upon genre in EDM. I’m talking about the new album from Disciple’s own Dubloadz, a dude who’s made a pretty household name for himself over the last few years with his, uhm, interesting and ridiculous take on the genre. His newest (and first) full length effort, Dubloadz and the 9000 Ghosts is set to hit all online retailers in full on August 10th and has plenty of both negative and positive hype amongst the scene. The question is, is it any good? We’re going to have to go ahead and say we’ll take a hard pass on this one.
The album opens up with a song called “Cringe Control” featuring guest vocals from Crichy Crich who has worked with Loadz several times already. The irony of the track is that it’s making fun of gimmick artists with the hook over the buildup repeating the words “Fuck your fucking gimmicks bitch” while the tune itself is in fact nothing more than mainstream bullshit. I suppose if what they were going for was a self loathing track it succeeded as I’m certainly cringing hard listening to how awful it is. High pitched screeching noise on the initial hit, shitty noisy wonks following with Dubloadz’ trademark overuse of stupid samples and vocals in between sets the tone for the rest what’s to come on the entire release.
I’ll admit at this point knowing I had 12 more tracks to get through to complete this review kind of made me want to just throw my laptop so I skipped through to some of the more notable ones that I’d seen people talking about online. I mean there had to be something to this album and how excited people were for it that I was missing, right? Well, no, not at all.
“Riddim Rats” the fourth track on the album and the first single is nothing short of an atrocity. If you’re going to have the audacity to make a track with the word “riddim” in it you might actually want to try to stick to the genre you’re naming it after. Instead what we get here is a bunch of ridiculously off time noises overlapping each other into an array of bullshit. Apparently no one gave Dubloadz the memo that actual riddim needs to be half the volume of a normal track and can’t use more than 4 different sounds. Maybe this new age of mainstream garbage (Disciple artists, I’m talking to you guys) trying to make riddim is something I have to get used to, but for me this just sounds like it falls between the ass crack of riddim fans and brostep fans; It doesn’t please anyone.
The next standout track on the album was the anticipated collaboration between Dubloadz and Metal-EDM-Hybrid-Whatever producer Sullivan King titled “Break the Rail.” It should’ve been called break my fucking face with a sledgehammer because I have no other words besides “Just fucking kill me” after listening. With this track Dubloadz proves that he not only has no understanding of what actual dubstep or riddim are supposed to sound like, but is also clueless to what metal is. I can imagine him sitting in his room thinking “Let’s see what other genre I can completely ruin. I’ve already turned dubstep and house into total shit, why not ruin a genre with actual instruments next?” I gotta say I feel bad for Sullivan on this one as he really got suckered into a finely polished turd of a track. While the guitars and screechy vocals are reminiscent of something only a 14 year old scene girl could appreciate, you can tell he at least gave it his best effort to save the material Dubloadz gave him to work with. It simply wasn’t enough and instead we get the wannabe edgiest track of the year. Sorry Sullivan but we hope you can stick to working with good artists from now on because you’re better than this!
I could sit here and destroy every track on the album individually, but I really don’t have the time for that as I enjoy my life and don’t like to force suffering upon myself any more than I need to. There’s a collaboration with Virtual Riot that sounds like a B-list Chodegang ripoff, (kind of embarrassing for a musician as talented as Virtual Riot to copy a bunch of dudes in emoji masks…) a lousy bass house track that sounds like the OTT plugin had an abortion all over the master channel, a track with FuntCase which I’m going to completely ignore seeing as FuntCase is an absolute legend that should have no part in this miserable album (Hey Disciple, how much money did you pay the poor guy to be a part of this?) and a really emo attempt at a melodic track called “Life Goes On” which is more than likely meant to provoke emotion but ended up dryer than sandpaper on a riddim kids salty hair after sitting at Coachella all day. The bottom line here is every track sounds EXACTLY the same minus Fight Music 2017 (Praise the gods Dubloadz made something decent like his old stuff) but if you’ve made it that far into the album I applaud you for surviving.
At the end of the day I get it. There’s tons of people that have horrible taste in music that will pay money for this assortment of donkey shit Dubloadz calls music, but I’m not one of them, and I can assure you if they printed physical copies of the album I would buy 5 of them just to tee off with at the golf course. RIP dubstep and RIP riddim, you have Dubloadz to thank for your premature death.
Words by Dave Nardolilli | Photo via Jo Taylor Photography
