Album Review: Mindless Self Indulgence - How I Learned To Stop Giving A Shit And Love Mindless Self Indulgence

“Son of a bitch/God likes me/I am the best/Fuck everybody else” sings Jimmy Urine on Mindless Self Indulgence's Witness, the first track from How I Learned…, and it sure sounds like the group have done anything but grow up - for better or worse. Labelling your music as industrial jungle pussy punk comes with its own weight outside of musical connotations. Can you really be that unbridled in your fun, that steeped in your irony and still be enjoyable? Fortunately, MSI can.

Sampled break beats, hard-edged punk rock guitar and Jimmy Urine's trademark screaming-cum-rap vocals all permeate through this succinct 35-minute record. Highlights, Fuck Machine, I Want To Be Black and Casio, have the band ignoring their recent, more structured past and delving deep into sampled beat, broken verse and cheesy keyboard territory, complete with embarrassingly singalong offensive lyrics.

To be sure, these are still tunes that trap the band in their Hot Topic, bitten black nail polish fan-base, but that's something they should certainly have come to terms with by now.

The band have always stood as an affront to mature intelligent music, a sort of ultimate extension of the punk rock “fuck the man” id impulses. When it works, like on early albums Tight and Frankenstein Girls Will Seem Strangely Sexy, the music is fun, harmless and infectiously enjoyable. How I Learned… isn't quite a return to the group's highest calibre of childish joy, but it's a damn fun and surprisingly multi-layered return to form following recent missteps.