Speedy Justice - I Love You

Speedy Justice is an experimental noise, and industrial project whose history is brief. The project’s sole purpose is a noble one which is an attempt to help people who have mental illness, whether they gained it biologically or through social conditioning. The project has so far released “Yeah Yeah”, “What’s Wrong?”, “Nervous”, “Grudging Iconoclast”, and the subject of today’s review, “I Love You”. While I do find Speedy Justice’s goals to be well-off and honorable, the sound that comes out of “I Love You” is a culmination of various genres that do not fit well together. It is a disjointed mess of a release that does not know what it wants to sound like or where it belongs.   

The album begins with the song titled ‘Cancer’. Static noise serves as the groundwork for the rhythms and experimental samples that coagulate around it. I am grateful that Speedy Justice did not find it in their heart to completely blast the noise found within this song as most noise musicians would have done in the name of art. Later in the song, deep and stretched out vocals come into play. Towards the end of the song, it sounds as if Speedy Justice is sampling a pop song, but it’s so distorted it’s hard to make out. While I find this song to be interesting, it’s not one that I would ever find myself listening to ever again after this review is done. 

‘Alzheimer’s’ is a song that I completely wrote off after passing through it once. It’s a trudge through experimental, noisy electronics that simply aren’t pleasant to my ears. I cringed the whole way through the first passing of it. On the second passing, I made it ten seconds into the song until I skipped it and moved onto the next one. The following song, ‘Heroin’, completely threw me off and made me scratch my head. Plucks of a guitar play out for a few seconds before samples of a busy city are thrown in, and then I was thrown right into the middle of some smooth Latin jazz.  Towards the end of the song, a thunderstorm hits and leads us out. While this song is pleasant to listen to, I was also confused as to why it was placed in this album; it simply does not belong. 

The beginning of ‘Panic Attack’ sounds like a Dance Dance Revolution song on speed, which fits the title of the track perfectly. After about a minute of this, the beat is cut off abruptly and I was placed into the middle of a disco-inspired, beat driven track. Again, not bad, but it simply was off path for the record. Towards the end of the song, middle-eastern influences are thrown in. On each of my plays of the album, whenever I got to this point, I felt as if Speedy Justice was just throwing shit at a wall and was seeing what stuck. I understand that the album is experimental, but most experimental albums at least have a definitive sound and understand what they want to be; this one sounds like a hodgepodge of random ideas that do not correlate with one another. 

Power electronics seem to take over on ‘The Amount Of More You Can Take’ and, with the alarm sounding synths in the background, comes off quite good. However, this sound evaporates into quiet nothingness that sounds as if it’s a hundred feet away instead of being at the front of attention. ‘Hypochondria’ starts off as a hundred-mile-per-hour dance track which then descends into a dark ambient track reminiscing the cosmos. ‘Panic Attack Reimagined’ is what it sounds like; it takes the original track and transforms it. However, instead of the disco beats I mentioned earlier, everything is drowned in noise. It’s another hard pass for me. 

‘Golden’ is another song that simply does not belong on this album. It’s a blues song with just voice and piano. It’s pretty good, and by itself I might listen to it, but paired in the middle of this album I just don’t wish to revisit it. The following song begins with tribal beats and then slowly fades into a dark ambient track complete with subterranean bass.  Not terrible, but not anything special either. The next song is a mixture of techno and noise, but nothing is clean cut. The bass is so crunchy on ‘Rawhide’ that it distorts the other sounds around it. It’s ugly. 

There are five additional songs on “I Love You” titled ‘Hihowareyou?’, ‘Just After Dusk’, ‘Colonial Pipeline 2021’, ‘Quiescence’, and ‘Clinical Depression’. However, many of my previous thoughts and complaints from above will be repeated again. There is just so much wrong with “I Love You” that I cannot recommend this album to anyone. It sounds as if someone hit shuffle on their phone, the app they were using glitched out, and every song just began to mix and meld with one another to a horrible, experimental result. The end result is that “I Love You” comes off as one of the worst albums I have ever heard in my life. All that being said, however, and though I hold no love for the music on “I Love You”, I will praise Speedy Justice for using his music in a therapeutic fashion for those with mental illnesses. It’s just not an album for me. Unfortunately, then, I must give this album a one-and-a-half out of ten.