By Staff Writer Ben Pfeffer.
DISCLAIMER: This article is part of The Torch’s annual “Torchure” issue, the April fools Issue. During the Torchure, our journalistic ethics and commitment to the truth hop on the earliest bus out of town, and we spend the better part of the week trying to coax them back with cannolies and baby oil. The Torch will return to faithful, truthful coverage of UMass Dartmouth-centric news next week, until then, enjoy whatever this is?
DO NOT BUY THIS ALBUM. It is one of the worst albums to ever appear on this planet since J.K. Rowling dropped her last album all the way back in 2007, The Deathly Hallows.
In all honesty, I was hyped for the new album “The Strange Case” by Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it was a complete letdown… and complete letdown doesn’t even begin to describe how much of a waste of time it was to listen to it.
With the names of the artists, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, I felt like it was going to be Dr. Dre and Eminem-level album. This album turned out to be at more of a Bhad Bhabie Logan Paul Back Pack Kid level… and that’s going easy on it.
The very first song in the album lists the name of the album, the names of the artists, and then they just admit to having a ghost writer in the first 5 seconds of the album. They flat out say, “written by Robert Louis Stevenson.” Imagine not being able to write at the level of what is possibly the worst album in the history of modern music.
The first song is missing background music entirely. It’s just one person talking with an, admittedly, very relaxing voice that I wish I had. However, this soothing voice does not fill the void of an absence of music itself.
During multiple songs in this album, the… saying artist would give them too much credit… the talker used multiple different voices as if to convey that they were a different person when they very clearly were not.
There are a few things that I do like about this album, and they are things that most albums fail to do. Most artists only have stories throughout one song, but this album tries to tell a story throughout the entirety of the album.
It tells the story, however too literally, of a man who is a well-respected scientist who gets involved in the darker side of science. He ends up transforming himself into an animal of a man, a murderous criminal that represents the bad in humanity, and the scientist tries to control the animal version of himself, but eventually fails. I wonder what this could represent in the ghostwriter’s real life.
It also spreads a message. The message that “artists” Dr Jekyll, Mr Hyde, and ghostwriter Robert Louis Stevenson are trying to spread is about the duality of man. It is that all humans have a “duality” to them. Basically, for the uneducated, this means that two separate humans physically live inside every human, next to their stomach, and the human can ask either one for advice, kind of like an angel and devil situation.
Okay back to the bad things. I have somehow made it all 3 hours through this excruciatingly long album. Not ONCE have I heard a beat. The simple thing that has defined all music since the dawn of time. Can we even call this music? There is no texture, besides the accent of the talker. There are no instruments besides the voice.
There is no pattern. Nothing can define this as music. The only thing that defines this as art is the story aspect.
If you’re questioning my legitimacy, I’m currently in MUS-101 so I know quite a bit about music and definitely know enough to be able to tell that this album should not have been made. Nobody should have even stepped into the studio to make this album, and if I had to take an educated guess, I would say that nobody did.