All right, I’ll admit to having been a skeptic about the latest WACK unit to emerge. ANAL SEX PENiS, or ASP as I prefer to call them because I’m not some prurience-obsessed teenager and I have to worry about how and where my website’s going to show up in various people’s Google results, really did feel like a stupid gimmick at first. Yes, we were willingly falling for an obvious ruse, as usual playing along with one Watanabe J. for the sake of getting to the bottom of whichever kind-of-inexplicable-but-no-doubt-lucrative-and-enviable game he was playing this time around, but the thing about falling for even obvious ruses is that you still went there and in the interests of intellectual honesty you have to admit to yourself that you did, in fact, let yourself believe if only for the briefest of moments, like a kid old enough to know better unironically hating the heel. I mean, read this. The line between truth and kayfabe is always clearly there somewhere, but whether you find it in the place where it really is as opposed to where you assume it to be, therein lies the trouble.

But anyway! As ASP emerged as a bona fide actual, regular-ol’ idol unit (name notwithstanding), it also became clear that they had the musical chops. And of course they did — WACK can be and usually is a lot of things, but musically not-good is not one of them. Yes there’s a template, and no we don’t call it Kentacore because it’s so wildly diverse, but good and enjoyable and undeniably punk-inspired if not outright so are all true things to say about the product, and those are perfectly fine bars to set, and then we can leave up to you the question of whether you like and want to listen to ANAL SEX PENiS.

Anyway! ASP’s first album is arriving, and they’ve been trickling out ever more music on Soundcloud as is the wont of new WACK units, and then yesterday they dropped their first MV, which is pretty much also the clearest multisensory view we’ve had of them yet: Continue reading →