Neil Banging Out the Tunes: 26 Albums by Lemon Demon and Associated Projects

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First of all: I know you're supposed to say "siss-uh-ree-gah", but I pronounce it "chi-chi-air-eh-gah", usually while making a little "chef's kiss" motion with my hand. And second, well, I've said this before, but: me and Neil, we go way back. Because back in the day I was an Animutation kid! Yeah, I had a pretty big Newgrounds phase in middle school, and I was specifically very into Animutations, which is where you'd take a song in a non-English language (usually, but not always, Japanese), purposefully "mishear" the lyrics, and then make a little collage-style music video for it. Oh, and you had to include Colin Mochrie. It was my first introduction to something that could reasonably be called "culture jamming", and also to sO rAnDoM XD humor, which is very important if you are eleven years old. I feel about Animutations the way people a few years younger than me feel about YouTube Poops.

And Neil Chi-chi-air-eh-gah invented the Animutation! I remember seeing him around Newgrounds and thinking he was this massively imposing, unapproachable figure, which is crazy 'cause at the time he was just a homeschooled kid from the suburbs of Boston who wasn't much older than I was. (fwiw in terms of irl degrees of separation from Neil: she had already graduated by the time i got there, but i went to college with a few people who had known Mr. Cicierega's eventual wife Ming Doyle)

Neil Cicierega actually invented... a significant portion of modern internet culture. Like honestly it's bizarre for someone to be so consistently good at being online as he's been--I would have expected a cancellation or at the very least a fall-off at some point but it just hasn't happened. (when i google "Neil Cicierega allegations" the inescapable AI just starts talking about Neil Gaiman instead, since i guess there can only be one Neil) I guess it helps that Mr. Cicierega was never in the kind of position where he felt like he had to produce a constant stream of content to survive, and so was able to kinda log off at the turn of the 2020s. We should all be so lucky! Neil Cicierega comes to us from a more civilized era of history.

This one's for you, creakyboardz, at least in terms of upload timing.

Trapezoid - Outsmart (2000)

5/10

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CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Japanese Pokerap" by Neil Cicierega, the first Animutation, which, um, is a "film" apparently. According to rym. Yeah, "Animutation" is a film genre and they all used to be catalogued on here but then most of them got deleted except for this and its follow-up. This website's rules for what can and can't be added to the database make no sense at all to me.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: I remember around this time the New York Times ran an article where a man tried to see whether it was possible to survive for one week never leaving his room and ordering everything he needed off the internet. And the eventual conclusion was no, he couldn't, which is hilarious twenty-five years later when that's what everyone does.

REVIEW: It is. Shitty teenage MIDI music.

Except it's honestly not that shitty. Like, considering that a fourteen-year-old made this, this is a pretty solid album of cod-VGM. It's certainly a hell of a lot better than the kind of MIDI files I can throw together! Neil in this era really, really liked the Monkey Island games, but what's wrong what that? I'd like to know.

RANKING: 19 of 26

Trapezoid - Microwave This CD (2001)

3/10

⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Japanese Pokerap" by Neil Cicierega, by Neil Cicierega, which is the one I always think of as "the first Animutation".

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Lore Fitzgerald Sjöberg was publishing "The Book of Ratings", a blog where he would give letter grades to, like, random shit, like pop-culture minutiae and abstract concepts and shit like that. It was, looking back on it, very much TV Tropes-style "this is what the refrance" type humor, but it ended being a kind of formative writing influence on lil' ol' me. I mean, that's what I do now, right. I rate things. Anyway the blog is now down so the only way to experience The Book of Ratings is via the printed book edition--but frustratingly many of the funniest entries never made it into the book and are now, say it with me, Lost Media.

REVIEW: Okay so the lore behind this one is interesting: so young Neil Cicierega used to distribute all of his stuff via MP3.com, which was kind of a y2k-era proto-Bandcamp that allowed artists to upload and sell their own music. Only problem was that MP3 Dot Com was a twin casualty of some spurious record-industry copyright lawsuits and the dot com crash, and so in 2003 it went under, rendering many of its files, say it with me, Lost Media. And that included this album! Yeah, for a long time you couldn't get this anywhere--and Neil himself was no help, as he claimed to have forgotten what the tracklisting of this thing was. That is, until a Lemon Demon fan was cleaning out his closet and found a copy of the CD with the tracklisting on the back--and, thankfully, it turned out that every song on here had already been archived on various other fans' hard drives. Interestingly, though, the album cover you see on this page is not the actual original album cover, but rather a rendering on what the cover might look like based on that fan's description. Thoroughly mysterious.

Anyway I am torn because Neil has clearly grown in music skill here, and has also started to pull from things other than video game music, and by that I mean that there's a track which is a pretty blatant ripoff of "Whip It" on here... but at the same time this thing is an hour long and the songs with the vocal samples are the most annoying things in the world. So it's a wash really!

RANKING: 24 of 26

Trapezoid - Dimes (2002)

5/10

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CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Hatten är din" by Veckans Hatt, which actually premiered a few months before "Japanese Pokerap" and which Neil has cited as an inspiration--therefore, quite possibly the real first Animutation. Also these all used to link to the Animutation Portal Wiki, but in the couple of weeks since initially writing this and migrating it to the new website that wiki has gone down--Lost Media, we don't need it do we--so you're just gonna have to take my word for it about these.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Something Awful Dot Com, in an attempt to stop people from re-registering after getting banned, started charging $10 to use their forums. As an internet nerd in his thirties I of course have Complicated Feelings about Something Awful--I have to begrudging respect it as an early vanguard of techno-pessimism during the y2k bubble era's irrational exuberance--but I never actually had an account myself. Neil Cicierega, however... Neil was an SA Goon from way back. The phrase "SA Goon" meant something different back then. Also it's fuckin' crazy that fourteen-year-old Neil's mom gave him Ten United States Dollars so that he could post on a forum full of libertarians. I wouldn't even consider asking my parents for something like that.

REVIEW: God. When I saw that Shmorky is featured on this album it felt like someone punched me in the stomach. The saga of Shmorky is honestly too depressing to type here, and also there are basically no reliable sources on it--this is one of those cases where a person clearly did some very bad stuff, but since that person happens to be trans the only people talking about it are, um, KiwiFarms. I considered including a "funny Shmorky anecdote" behind these spoiler tags but, actually, no, I don't think I'm gonna. I don't want to be that type of person. But let's not talk about that. Let's talk about, of course, "I Know Your Name", which is definitely not the best but maybe the most important song in the Cicierega discography. Because: it's a pop song! With vocals! And guitars!

It sounds like Weird Al's They Might Be Giants pastiche, only with an unexpected swerve into surf rock for the chorus. It's... it's not what I would call good but what it is is ambitious--I mean it really builds and Neil plays a solo and everything--and I gotta respect it. Rest of this album is more MIDI instrumentals, but, again, Neil is getting better at these--there's one track that has an actual house beat, like the kind of thing you can dance to, and the horror-movie-soundtrack "Invisible Blood" is... again, not good, but ambitious, and that's what counts here. Oh, and the track with Shmorky sucks.

RANKING: 18 of 26

Clown Circus (2003)

7/10

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CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "French Erotic Film" by Andrew "TMST" Kepple. One of the most successful non-Cicierega-created Animutations, and teeeechnically you are supposed to call those "fanimutations". But I'm not gonna.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Something Awful bans a bunch of guys from its anime subforum for posting lolicon, and one of them would go and found his own website, purporting to be a western version of Japan's 2ch, called "4chan". Honestly? People really overstate 4chan's impact on internet culture. Very little actually originated there, with most "4chan things" actually coming from other websites. Or, very little of value I guess.

REVIEW: Nine out of ten sociopaths agree: "Hyakugojyuuichi 2003" is... definitely a song. I mean, it's Neil Cicierega getting all of his whitest friends together to rap about how cool he is. Also, I am eternally in awe of the ability teenagers have to be nostalgic for things that happened like a year ago. And yet... and yet I am sorry I can't front I love that song. All six minutes of it. I think that's mostly because Neil really does work some magic with that sample flip (over a surprisingly strong beat--sort of like a hip-house/native tongues hybrid, i guess what i am describing is a "Deee-Lite type beat"), and also, um, it's about stuff I know about. When Niel says "get that Xiao Xiao outta my face" I sit straight up in my chair. I am not immune to the appeal of culturally-mediated pseudo-ingroup signifiers!

Elsewhere... well, okay, "Lemon Demon" the song is a pretty obvious case of "someone told Neil about Cardiacs" but it honestly works really well, and then the stretch of tracks after that kind of fall into this very charming sort of nerd-synthpop groove, "random" lyrics and all. There's a fairly rough patch in the middle of this album--"Pepper and Salt" is an attempt at reggae, and the less that is said about "Holy Bison Beaks!" the better--but then you get into semi-psychedelic ballad "Somnolence" and the power-pop "Fire Motif" and all is forgiven. And then of course it's "Hyakugojyuuichi 2003" time. This is an album where I honestly find it very hard to say whether it's "good" or not because there is a lot here that is objectively not good at all but god damn do I enjoy it.

RANKING: 14 of 26

MP3S I DOWNLOADED BACK IN THE DAY: "Don't Be Like the Sun", "Idiot Control Now"

Live From the Haunted Candle Shop (2003)

4/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Irrational Exuberance" by Veloso. Not Caetano Veloso, different guy. Most memorable for being set to "Yatta!" by はっぱ隊 [Happa-tai]--truly the proto-"Gangnam Style".

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Um. I guess YTMND was big? I was super into YTMND--another Something Awful offshoot project, incidentally--probably event to a greater degree than I was into Animutation. Probably because the barrier to entry was lower. But, as I have said before, basically what paltry knowledge I have of image and sound editing comes from my experience on YTMND.

REVIEW: First of all: I don't think you are allowed to have the word "live" in your album title unless it's actually a live album. That's against the rules. I have the same problem with Live at the Witch Trials.

Second... well, I am torn. See, I really do admire how much Neil, at least in this era, is always pushing himself and always trying new things, and the "new thing" this time is: guitar. And I mean it's not exactly new, he played guitar on the last few albums too, but it's all over this one, he was very clearly trying to make a Rock Album here and I admire his vision. The dancefloor is dead and we're making rock music!

That might, however, be all that I admire. Because, well, first of all, this album sounds kind of terrible, and not in the good way--I don't know how to explain the fact that drunk Bob Pollard vomiting into a four-track on Alien Lanes sounds like the most badass thing in the world, while nice respectable Neil Cicierega strumming his little guitar in his bedroom sounds vaguely pathetic--you just have to feel it. And no I don't necessarily expect a home recording by a teenager to sound "professional" exactly (although in 2026 home recordings by teenagers fully do sound "professional"), it's more just that I... don't think Neil Cicierega is very good at working with the tools he has, y'know? In particular this thing is terribly mixed, which is first of all very weird because the kind of digital production environment Mr. Cicierega works with actively rewards endless obsessive Donald-Fagen-style mix-tinkering... and also you can't just chalk that up to this being juvenilia because Spirit Phone sounds bad in the exact same way.

Of course none of this would matter if the tunes were good. But unfortunately a really solid chunk of this album is kind of tuneless and forgettable. Tracks like "Mr. Wolfgang" and "Fiberglass Monkey" and "Booja Jabooja" and "Party on the Moon" just... do not need to exist. Actually, lemme just tell you about the songs I do like:

• "Destructo!" has a fun guitar part;
• "Dance Like an Idiot" is the 2000s update of Frank Zappa's "Dancin' Fool" we didn't know we needed;
• "Switzerland" is a song about running away from your problems by going to Switzerland, which is a thing I think about doing regularly;
• "Birdhouse in Your Soul" is by far the best-written song on here and it's a cover--always a good sign;
• "Mold en Mono" has this great semi-Brazilian-inflected groove, which makes me think that Neil has always been misguided doing indie rock when he sound instead have been making dance-pop the whole time; and
• "Movie Night" is Neil doing the whole "sad mournful ballad at the end of the quirky novelty-pop album" thing but he pulls it off so well, and the song's commentary on stagnation of American pop culture is maybe the first time a Lemon Demon song has been about something.

Hip to the Javabean (2004)

9/10

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CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "DEW HAAST" by Drunk Magikoopa. Drunk Magikoopa ("DMK" for short) was a... controversial figure in the world of Animutation, like I remember being on the now-dearly-departed Animutation Portal and there being giant warnings everywhere to be very very careful if you ever clicked on one of his uploads. And that is because, well. He liked to include 2000s-era "shock images" in his Animutations. You know, goatse and tubgirl and lemonparty and shit like that. DMK would later go on to adopt a wacky gimmick persona on a nascent social media platform called "Twitter" under the name... @dril. That's right. Dril got his start making Animutations. I wonder how many people know that? Anyway my current take on dril is that he is a parody of a very specific type of forum/comment section guy that doesn't actually exist anymore so he's kind of a walking (or I guess posting) fossil now.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Speaking of nascent social media platforms, around this time a certain Harvard student was making a website where you could rate how hot the girls in your class were. Interestingly, despite my own techno-pessimism, I was actually a fairly early adopter of Facebook--a girl in my class had an older brother who went to an Ivy League school and he hooked us all up with invites. It's really funny to me that when Facebook started its appeal was that it was the social media website where there weren't any old people, and now it's the social media website where there are only old people.

REVIEW: Whoa where the fuck did this come from. In the eight months between this and Live from the Haunted Candle Shop Neil seems to have locked the fuck in, because this is one of the most massive jumps in quality I've ever seen an artist perform in such a short time frame. Like, how.

But I am not one to look a gift horse in his weird, slightly-too-large-for-his-face mouth. This album is really good. I think, first of all, that its main strength is how well it flows, it's perfectly sequenced and every song leads into the next one so effortlessly, you can just let this thing wash over you. But at the same time! Each individual song--yes, even the "filler" ones like "Musical Chairs" and "Fancy Pants Manifesto"--is just incredibly well-written, catchy and complex and wonderful. The overall style here is, like, kind of Beatles-y psych-pop but with (subtly) these kinda funky r&b-adjacent beatz... honestly, Tame Impala would take this approach to the top of the charts several years later. But this is way better. Best tracks are "Relativity" (hints of, of all things, flamenco on that one), "I've Got Some Falling to Do" (even though i swear i've heard that riff somewhere else before), and "Telekinesis". "Telekinesis", wacky pseudo-Motown backing vocals and all. God I love that song. Quite possibly the best thing Neil ever did!

And... I get the feeling that this is maybe Neil's first album that is About Something. 'Cause, like, on songs like "Sunbeam Light Show Flower Seed" and "Go to Hollywood" and "Consumer Whore" (which, btw, that line about the "cute little Nokia cell phone" has aged wonderfully), you get the feeling that Neil Cicierega was kind of at a crossroads in his life. Not a girl, not yet a woman--he was 18 years old and, I wonder, considering whether to try to make this whole "music" thing into an actual career--and if so, on whose terms to do it. There's an alternate universe where Neil goes to Berklee (not too far from home!), bops around in LA and/or Nashville for a while, and eventually goes to one of those songwriting camps in Korea where he gets scouted for a job at SM Entertainment and ends up chained up in a basement somewhere writing songs for Super Junior. I wonder if that's why Neil decided to re-record his first "real" song "I Know Your Name" on here--maybe he was wondering whether making "real" songs was even a good idea. Arguably we won't ever actually know the answer to that!

RANKING: 3 of 26

MP3S I DOWNLOADED BACK IN THE DAY: "Sunbeam Light Show Flower Seed", "Telekinesis", "Consumer Whore", "I've Got Some Falling to Do"

Damn Skippy (2005)

6/10

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CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "We Drink Ritalin" by Robinson Wilburn. Notable for "starring" Alex Chiu, an internet con artist who claims to have invented a pair of rings that make you immortal. And I mean, this Animutation is from 2002 and Mr. Chiu is still at it, so, um. Maybe he's onto something.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Cracked Dot Com was founded, meaning that there was in fact a two-year overlap period during which both Cracked the listicle website for midwits and Cracked the Mad ripoff print magazine were both in print simultaneously. Cracked the magazine was actually super fascinating: after Mad's success a billion ripoff magazines sprung up around it, always with named like "Crazy" or "Bonkers" or something, but Cracked managed to survive for forty subsequent years by poaching a few of Mad's big-named artists (notably Jonathan Severin and Don Martin). But then in the early 2000s it got sold to a private equity firm--before that was cool!--who installed a new editor whose "vision" for the magazine was to turn it into a Maxim-style lad mag. Honestly the print magazine Cracked is way more interesting than the website. Most notable thing about the website is that the hosts of my favorite podcast briefly got a gig making videos for them before being Fired For Truth, and they reported that Cracked Dot Com still maintains a brick-and-mortar office in Brooklyn with a full-size mural of Doge on one wall.

REVIEW: Um, well. I'd call this a significant step back, honestly. Not necessarily musically--this is very much "straightforward pop-rock" and isn't nearly as sophisticated as Hip to the Javabean, but it's honestly pretty good straightforward pop-rock--but in terms of, for lack of a better word, vision. These songs are the kind of monkey-ninja-pirate-cheese randomsauce shit that people who don't like Neil Cicierega probably think every Neil Cicierega song is about. I mean, "Word Disassociation" is literally just a bunch of unrelated words in a row. Catchy tune though!

But yeah, I find a lot of this... tiresome. I do not want to hear about any frickin' epic robot apocalypses, and "Geeks in Love" honestly gave me a pretty warped an unhealthy perception of romantic relationships at an age when I really did not need that (you need more to sustain a relationship than just wacky in-jokes!) (also that's the song where Neil says "giggity giggity giggity"). And I don't mean to be too harsh here because a lot of the music is pretty good here, like "Subtle Oddities", "Flamingo Legs", "Smell Like a Cookie All Day", and especially the dubby-psych-rock-via-XTC "Dizziful Bliss" are all great. Also though: was Neil in love when he made this album? Because that last one, "Geeks in Love", and the bonus track "Fuzzy"... those tracks are downright limerent. Heck, "Smell Like a Cookie All Day", who remembers being a teenager in the 2000s and having a crush on a girl who used to slather herself in vanilla-scented drugstore perfume? I think it's a pretty universal experience! Also "Fuzzy" is the only worthwhile bonus track. The other ones all suck.

This is a kind of unfocused review--for an unfocused album!--so I'm just gonna end it by talking about the only two tracks I really like on here. First: "Ode to Crayola", which is the same kinda childish randomness as the rest of this thing--bitch wrote a song about crayons...--but which has actual soul, y'know? And second, and most importantly: "Gonna Dig Up Alec Guinness". One thing I am really seeing about Neil's creative vision that really set him apart early is how much he clocked into the endless, futureless zombification of the post-end-of-history pop-culture industry. Hey, do you think Neil Cicierega ever read Mark Fisher? Actually wait a version of Neil Cicierega that has read Mark Fisher exists, so never mind.

RANKING: 16 of 26

MP3S I DOWNLOADED BACK IN THE DAY: "Dead Sea Monkeys", "Geeks in Love", "Ode to Crayola", "Word Dissassociation"

Dinosaurchestra (2006)

9/10

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CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Earth vs. Funk" by Neil Cicierega. My favorite of the Cicierega-crafted Animutations--I like that it has a vague narrative, and also the song it's set to ("Funkastic" by Rip Slyme) is just a banger.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Neil Banged Out The Tunes. The second most important thing to ever happen on April 13th.

REVIEW: Okay so first of all: yes, "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny". It's on this album. And did I watch that video on Newgrounds multiple times a day my freshman year of high school? Did I memorize all the lyrics and recite them to myself on the way to school on the subway? Yes. Yes I did. The main this I will say about it now is that even when this album came out Neil kind of acknowledged that this particular kind of humor was dying if not already dead--in particular, he makes a point to note that, while Chuck Norris jokes may have been in vogue when he first wrote the song, they'd already kind of become passe when it came out, and so the fact that Chuck Norris gets killed at the end serves as kind of a symbolic funeral for that whole *gestures vaguely* thing.

(sidenote: "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" actually kinda doesn't fit all that well on this album, musically--it's way too bouncy and cheap-sounding. i kinda feel like Neil just included it here because it was the "hit")

What is the thing, though? A line from ~creakyboardz's review of Damn Skippy that has stuck in my head while I've been listening to all of these Lemon Demon albums is that "Neil seems happy to play with his toys". And, like, how else do you make sense of "The Ultimate Showdown etc. etc." except as a transcript of a kid smashing their action figures together? And how else do you understand a story in which a kid (named Neil, who does not know how to play an instrument) goes back in time, joins a dinosaur rock band, and eventually rocks so hard that he saves them all from the meteor? But then: how do you understand poor Indie Cindy, who quits her basement recording project because she had a bad dream about playing a show and bombing?

(sidenote 2: it's interesting how much of the tracks on here are made up of toy/thrift store instruments. there's a lyrical reference to a broken keyboard on "Indie Cindy", and Neil did in fact play parts of that song on a broken Yamaha CS15!)

The thing about playing with toys--at least the way I used to do it--is that it's a very hermetic, self-contained activity. When you're a kid and you're playing with other kids it tends to not be mediated through material objects as much, existing in This Hyper World with someone else is way more interesting than any hunk of plastic, but toys exist more than anything to give you something to do when you're alone. And... I described Neil Cicierega daughter Sidney Gish's No Dogs Allowed as bedroom pop for when you never leave your bedroom, and that's kind of what this is too, it's more than anything the sound of self-imposed isolation ("Vow of Silence", monastic style).

(sidenote 3: coming to understand that there is a proud "quirked up New England hermit" tradition, from Sidney Gish to Andrew Hussie to Neil Cicierega to They Might Be Giants to Jonathan Richman, all the way back to, um, fuckin' Emily Dickinson)

And the thing that makes this album work, more than anything, is that it's about the realization that you have to open yourself up to things outside your basement, you have to put away your toys and go outside. Because: what are toys but just a... just a literal repackaging and a literal commodification of culture? Toys, at the end of the day, are something you get sold, and if you form any kind of sentimental attachment to them then what you're forming a sentimental attachment to is the experience of... the experience of being a child, and not knowing any better than to be a mark, to get scammed. I think about the frequent pro wrestling references in Neil Cicierega's early work; I think about how in Toy Story the passive consumer Andy is the hero while the transformative artist Sid is the villain.

Actually... there is something here, something of a narrative you can glean from this album. You start with the slavish (and deadly) aping of past pop-culture iconography of "Action Movie Hero Boy", to the blinkered denial of "Fine" (which is inexplicably Neil's most-streamed track on Spotify, more than "The Ultimate Showdown" or anything off Spirit Phone, what gives). Then you realize the emptiness of that and retreat into solitude ("Vow of Silence") and reactionary fantasies ("Atchaeopteryx")... only to eventually discover that, well "Nothing Worth Loving Isn't Askew". As well as featuring a lot of busted toy instruments, one thing about this album is how many "mistakes" ended up getting left in the mix--there's odd panning everywhere, instrumental parts will come in a little behind or ahead of time, etc. Neil did not have to do that! But I think the real actual thing is that the hermetic fantasy of playing with the toys that mass culture has given you is a denial of the imperfection of actual life. The plastic toy is perfect--it's a perfect representation of a perfect cultural archetype--and to actually experience life you have to break those toys, you have to create something new out of them. The dinosaurs have to die eventually.

And the reason you have to do that is so that you can open yourself up to. Love. Which is what "The Too Much Song", this album's actual best track, is about.

(sidenote 4: i cannot believe that this is being relegated to a sidenote but i should actually talk about what this album sounds like, musically. it's really good! kind of a lo-fi new wave thing, but with a lot of dreamy psychedelic textures overlaid on it--later tracks in particular have an almost hypnotic quality to them, while still very much being recognizable pop songs. what it actually sounds a lot like is Japan's Moonriders, specifically in their early 80s new wave era, 青空百景 [Aozora hyakkei] to マニア・マニエラ [Mania manièra] to Amateur Academy. i will make the Moonriders become essential rymcore if it's the last thing i do--it's fucking insane that they have been around for 50+ years and are one of the most important bands in Japanese rock and yet only two of their albums even have more than a hundred ratings on here. but i bet Neil actually was tapped into them when he was making this album! i mean, back when he was 16 he was rocking Rip Slyme and POLYSICS, he knows ball.)

RANKING: 2 of 26

LYRICS I JUST TYPED OUT FROM MEMORY:

Old Godzilla was stomping around
Tokyo city like a big playground
When suddenly Batman burst from the shade
And hit Godzilla with a bat grenade
Godzilla got pissed and began to attack
But didn't expect to be blocked by Shaq
Who proceeded to open up a can of Shaq-Fu
When Aaron Carter came out of the blue
And he started beating up Shaquille O'Neal
Then they both got flattened by the Batmobile
But before it could make it back to the Batcave
Abraham Lincoln popped out of his grave
And took an AK-47 out from under his hat
And blew Batman away with a rat a tat tat
But he ran out of bullets and he ran away
Because Optimus Prime came to save the day
This is the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny
Good guys, bad guys, and explosions as far as the eye can see
And only one will survive, I wonder who it will be
This is the ultimate showdown of ultimate destiny
Godzilla took a bite out of Optimus Prime
Like Scruff McGruff took a bite out of crime
And then Shaq came back covered in a tire track
But Jackie Chan jumped out and landed on his back
And Batman was injured, and trying to get steady
When Abraham Lincoln came back with a machete
But suddenly something caught his leg and he tripped
Indiana Jones took him out with his whip
Then he saw Godzilla sneaking up from behind
And he reached for his gun which he just couldn't find
'Cause Batman stole it and he shot and he missed
And Jackie Chan deflected it with his fist
Then he jumped in the air and did a somersault
While Abraham Lincoln tried to pole vault
Onto Optimus Prime, but they collided in the air
Then they both got hit by a Care Bear stare
Angels sang out an immaculate chorus
Down from the heavens descended Chuck Norris
Who delivered a kick which could shatter bones
Into the crotch of Indiana Jones
Who fell over on the ground, writhing in pain
As Batman changed back into Bruce Wayne
But Chuck saw through his clever disguise
And he crushed Batman's head in between his thighs
Then Gandalf the Grey and Gandalf the White
And Monty Python and the Holy Grail's black knight
And Benito Mussolini and the Blue Meanie
And Cowboy Curtis and Jambi the Genie
Robocop, The Terminator, Captain Kirk, and Darth Vader
Lo-pan, Superman, every single Power Ranger
Bill S. Preston and Theodore Logan
Spock, The Rock, Doc Ock, and Hulk Hogan
All came out of nowhere lightning fast
And they kicked Chuck Norris in his cowboy ass
It was the bloodiest battle that the world ever saw
With civilians looking on in total awe
The fight raged on for a century
Many lives were claimed, but eventually
The champion stood, the rest saw their better
Mr. Rogers in a bloodstained sweater

Deporitaz - Circa 2000 (2007; recorded circa 2000)

3/10

⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Mostly Metal Jacket" by Bill Volk. Notable for being another narrative-driven Animutation, and also being set to the song 'Hubba Hubba Zoot-Zoot" by Caramba, which despite hitting number one in its native Sweden is not in Swedish or any other language, but rather in a made-up gibberish. I wonder if anyone ever did an Animutation set to "Prisencólinensináinciúsol".

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: You mean what was happening Circa 2000? Well, a man named Eric Bauman founded a "comedy" website with his father, called eBaum's World Dot Com. And this unassuming slop merchant became one of the early internet's most unlikely villains thanks to his habit of reposting content from some of the websites we've previously discussed, most notably YTMND and Something Awful, without credit. What can I say, people took some very trivial shit incredibly seriously back in the day. But this whole affair did inspire Neil Cicierega to release (and create an animated music video for!) a song called "eBaums World Dot Com", which features Eric Bauman getting beaten up by Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka. Lowtax, a guy about whom there is nothing objectionable. I'm honestly surprised Neil hasn't gotten that song taken down, but no, it's still on his official YouTube channel and everything! Anyway in 2009 Eric Bauman was fired from his own website and eBaum's World is now owned by Literally Media, an Israeli company that also controls Cracked Dot Com, Know Your Meme, and I Can Has Cheezburger.

REVIEW: Story goes that Neil used to have a "release an album every year" rule (which, lmao to that now, but he actually did maintain that momentum all the way up to Spirit Phone, if you count random singles/EPs/mashup albums/etc), but since it didn't seem like View-Monster was gonna be ready to release in 2007 he dusted off these old MIDI tracks from *looks directly at the camera* Circa Two Thousand. He even wanted to bring back the "Trapezoid" moniker, but a different band called Trapezoid threatened him with legal action (!?!?!) so he anagram'd it.

And, well. This does in fact sound like what Neil Cicierega was doing Circa Two Thousand. By which I mean it's MIDI instrumentals that sound like video game music. Except it's, like, worse than the stuff he actually released back then, probably because it's all outtakes. Still, kinda nice to have this as a "look how far we've come" moment after Dinosaurchestra!

RANKING: 25 of 26

Deporitaz - Miscellaneous (2007; recorded 2000-03)

2/10

⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Suzukisan" by Dwedit. The line "Imakuni? Kobayashi? Raymond????" will still occasionally pop back into my head unbidden.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: The heyday of Blogger Beware, a sadly-defunct blog that did humorous recaps of the Goosebumps books. It was really funny! What can I say, we were easy to amuse back then. But I wasn't the only one who enjoyed it--Neil Cicierega was actually a regular in the blog's comment section, and I'm pretty sure it inspired his later song "Goosebumps".

REVIEW: Objectively speaking, not an album. This is, in fact, a publicly-available directory on Lemon Demon Dot Com called "miscellaneous" that people have decided is an album. But it's not! The tracks are in god damn alphabetical order!

And I would argue that, even if that weren't true, this is one of the most objectively "not an album" things out there. It's mostly more MIDI toss-offs, but it does feature some other attempts at actual pop music from young Neil: "A Schizophrenic Twist", which is fine, and the two dorky white rap songs "Shut Up Your Mouth" and "The Ahnold Rap", which are not. Oh, and then there is also "Censored Smurfs", which is a precursor to "The Count Censored", one of Neil's earliest viral YouTube videos. I remember watching it and having absolutely no idea that it was also by the Lemon Demon guy!

RANKING: 26 of 26

View-Monster (2008)

8/10

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CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Foo-La-La!" by Indogutsu Tenbuki. Notable for being one of the very few Animutations not to be made in Macromedia Adobe Flash--no, this thing was made in god damn RPG Maker. Which means that it ain't, strictly speaking, animated, it's more a glorified PowerPoint presentation. But it's really good! Helps that it's set to another Rip Slyme song. They're great.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: People were photoshopping pictures of Barack Obama so that he looked like The Joker. Interestingly, this didn't start out as a political statement of any kind--The Dark Knight was really big, and some guy just wanted to try out the "jokerification" Photoshop technique he'd just learned, so he picked a photo of the person who was objectively the biggest public figure at the time, and the rest is history. I knew several guys on the High School Quiz Bowl Forums who used Joker-Obama as their profile pictures at soem point or another.

REVIEW: It's giving Chilling, Thrilling Sounds of the Haunted House. Yeah... the thing about this album is that I get the feeling Neil was more concerned about the sound than he was about the actual songs--hence the interlude tracks, and the occasional wacky choice like the tempo changes on "The Man in Stripes and Glasses" (btw, i listened to the BandCamp version of this thing, which I would recommend, because it has the aforementioned interlude tracks, plus it's remastered by Angel "Fire-Toolz" Marcloid). And that sound is, well, it's some goofy haunted-house shit. Kids love that kind of thing--just ask my daughter, who has spent the last few months pre-planning what our whole family is going to dress as for Halloween and how we are going to decorate our apartment. Do I love it? Maybe. Who knows.

Anyway, the thing about this album is that... there are some really bad songs on here, guys. Yes, I do mean "Knife Fight", which has an actually pretty solid riff but which unfortunately has... everything else. But I also mean... honestly most of the first half of this album, like "Marketland" and "Gadzooks", those are barely songs. Luckily! This album does pick up a lot as it goes on--my favorite track is probably "The Ocean", but "The Satirist's Love Song", "The Machine" and the (semi-reggae!) "The Only House That's Not On Fire (Yet)"... those are all great songs.

But. One final thing, though, is that--unlike Dinosaurchestra--this is another Lemon Demon album that isn't really about anything. It's mostly about. Sounds. Noises. They're good noises! And occasionally good songs. But it doesn't... it doesn't cohere. Oh, and don't bother listening to the bonus tracks, they're bad.

RANKING: 7 of 26

MP3S I DOWNLOADED BACK IN THE DAY: A demo version of "Bill Watterson" that was only a minute long. Interestingly, back in the day a Start From Here-era Joanna Wang recorded an acoustic cover of this song and sent it to Neil, which he then posted on his LiveJournal. And given the oddly sultry twist she ends the song with, this may have actually been her trying to shoot her shot with Mr. Cicierega. Wild.

Live (Only Not) EP (2011)

8/10

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CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "A Sticky Night of Love" by Kelenar. The song for this one comes from the Gravitation soundtrack, making it the first and possibly only Yaoimutation. I actually don't remember this one at all, but I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to introduce the two measures people would use to classify Animutations: the Wartysian Factor, which measures the degree to which something is an Animutation; and the Poiuytic Scale, which measures the complexity of an Animutation. But also, remember Cicierega's First Law: "If the person who made it says it's an Animutation, it's an Animutation, unless they're clearly just pulling our leg."

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Time skip! Kind of. Which means we missed out on 2009 and 2010, some pivotal years in internet history. But we did show up in time for October 25, 2011, when Andrew Hussie managed to inadvertently DDOS his own website, Newgrounds, MegaUpload, and the Twitch precursor Livestream Dot Com through the sheer power of "Cascade". Spoilers, obviously.

REVIEW: It's Live, because it's Neil playing with an actual band, but it's Only Not, because there's no audience. I think a lot about how different Lemon Demon would be if it were an actual travelin' band; if Neil had to live in a van with three other guys and a girl and play bars where people just wanted to them to shut up so that they could get drunk; if Neil had to actually deal with other people's creative input, and also the limitations of other people's instrumental technique; if Neil had constraints. I also think a lot about how different Lemon Demon would be if Neil had gone to public school, but that's another topic.

RANKING: 10 of 26

I Am Become Christmas EP (2012)

8/10

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CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "A Very Violent Christmas" by Hibiscus Kazeneko. I looked to see if there were any Xmas-themed Animutations and there are in fact several! I hadn't seen any of them, this one included. It's from 2006, by which point I'd stopped paying attention to the whole scene.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: This was the era of Rise of the Brave Tangled Frozen Dragons, which was a mashup of a bunch of animated children's movies that a bunch of people wrote fanfic about on tumblr back in the day. Kind of reminiscent of the whole Onceler thing, except not quite as ridiculous, and therefore ironically enough a lot lamer.

REVIEW: Never say I didn't listen to a Christmas album in August for you guys. Again.

...it's pretty good. I mean, it's fine. In retrospect this is kind of the debut of the slicked-up new wave style that Neil would ride to the top of the charts (for the given value of charts) on Spirit Phone; all these tracks are pretty good, my favorite being "Aurora Borealis". Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho.

RANKING: 9 of 26

Potter Puppet Pals - Potter Puppet Pals EP (2013)

4/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Colin Vs Jesus: FINALE!" by Andrew "TMST" Kepple. So the previously-mention "French Erotic Film" was in fact the first entry in a trilogy, and this is the ~epic~ conclusion. The thing I most remember about it is that there's a gag at the end where Kepple promises to put one frame of porn in the Animutation and helpfully gives us a pause button so that we can catch it but then the pause button is so big that it covers up all the porn. I mean, sure. Whatever.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Harry Potter. Given a recent news story involving Harry Potter fans forcing the British government to reroute an undersea power line to avoid disturbing the "grave" of Dobby the god damn Elf, I think it's fair to say that all millennials' brains should probably be dissected and studied to determine why we all liked these stupid fucking books so much. Actually I know the reason: it's because it's very easy to imagine the Harry Potter books as significantly better versions of what they actually are, and it's the not-actually-existent "good" Harry Potter that we've all made up in our heads that people are attached to. Evidence in favor of this: the modern Harry Potter fandom is mostly focused on versions of Harry's parents' friend group who fully do not appear in the books. Other Harry Potter-derived online fiction that I enjoy or at least appreciate the existence of: My Immortal by definitely-not-Rose-Christo; Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowski; Wizard People Dear Reader by Brad Neely; Wizardy Herbert and the Mobius Slipknot by Andrew Hussie.

REVIEW: File under "things which were once amusing but which generations of nerds have now made tiresome and obnoxious", right next to Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The building I lived in during college, which looked vaguely like Hogwarts, used to run a Harry Potter themed dinner every year and it was a huge deal, especially among townies, we made a bunch of money from it. I played Snape, several years in a row. And they also used to feature a live recreation of the "pipe bomb" skit. I wonder if they still do Harry Potter night now--on the one hand it was a big draw, on the other hand the people in my building were all very woke and quite often trans. We also used to do Rocky Horror shadowcasts and I wonder if that's still going on, for similar reasons. I'm also kind of surprised that Neil Cicierega has not disavowed this, but it isn't on streaming anymore so maybe he has. It would be kind of cool if he brought back the Potter Puppet Pals and made them say "trans rights" but I understand if maybe he just wants to leave the whole thing behind him. That's what I would do!

RANKING: 23 of 26

Nature Tapes EP (2014)

9/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Elvis Not Included" by Toxic AKA Bob Barker. A name to watch.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Um, well, tumblr user monetizeyourcat got cancelled. I have talked about myc, a person who still takes a disproportionate amount of my mental real estate, in more depth elsewhere, but I'm bringing her up again because one of the things she would occasionally talk about is her desire to "convert" various internet celebrities into being trans women (or at least not men). And her three main targets were Andrew Hussie, dril, and... Neil Cicierega. I guess, um. One out of three ain't bad!

REVIEW: You may disagree but to me this is Peak Cicierega. Like, I have complained before about Lemon Demon songs not being "about anything", but here Neil fully embraces that nothingness and it is amazing. Like, "Everybody Loves Raymond" is just the names of a bunch of sitcoms; "Goosebumps" is the same thing but for Goosebumps books; "Jaws" is the plot of Jaws; "Brodyquest" is just "Adrien Brody" in a robot voice... and they are all great songs. I think there was something incredibly freeing about just making one-off joke singles--part of the Lemon Demon story has always been the tension between Neil's shitposter impulses and his desire to make Real Music, and by fully giving up on Real Music here he has ironically crafted some of the best pop songs of his entire career. Best tracks are the genuinely very powerful love song "Goosebumps" and the psychological character study "My Trains"; best line is "sharks exist in real life! whoa!".

RANKING: 1 of 26

Neil Cicierega - Mouth Sounds (2014)

8/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Lesko's Revenge" by Neil Cicierega. Another OG Neil-created Animutation since these mashup albums are arguably an audio-only form of Animutation themselves.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Someone discovered that you could capture stems from a bunch of classic rock songs by data-mining the Rock Band games. That's why these mashup albums exist. Neil found out about the Rock Band stem rips and started playing around with them.

REVIEW: Those who cannot remember the 90s are condemned to repeat them.

RANKING: 5 of 26

Neil Cicierega - Mouth Silence (2014)

9/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "The Japanese Pokerap 2" by Neil Cicierega. Did you know there was a sequel? I didn't!

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: I suppose I should talk about Gamergate. But god I don't want to. And I am sure you don't want me to either.

REVIEW: Seriously, though: I rag on mashups occasionally, but they can be pretty damn good sometimes. It helps that Mr. Animutation isn't trying to make legitimate dance music here, but rather going for absurd comedy pranksterism and social commentary. Plus apparently there's a wacky sci-fi concept to these albums involving interdimensional warfare between a universe without Smash Mouth and a universe consisting only of Smash Mouth. In short: my shit, extremely my shit.

RANKING: 4 of 26

Neil Cicierega - Computer Fighters (2016)

5/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Grrl Revolution" by Insomnimania. Notable for being made in Macromedia Adobe Director rather than Flash, which meant that back in the days of dial-up modems the song would often fall out of sync with the animation. Also notable for being set to the Revolutionary Girl Utena theme song, but also being a satire of the idea of "girl power". I actually don't think I'm equipped to evaluate this.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Neil Cicierega was part of a sketch comedy group called Guaranteed* Video with two other guys named Kevin James (no relation) and Ryan Murphy (also no relation) (how did he find two guys with names like this). This is, in fact, a soundtrack to a Guaranteed* Video, um, video. I haven't watched it. There's actually a hell of a lot of Cicieregana that I haven't ever bothered with.

REVIEW: Incidental soundtrack music; the only actual "song" is "The Computer Fighter Rap" and even then that's marginal. Only thing it really inspires in me is a vague wonderment as to what it would be like if Neil Cicierega made a real film score for a real film. But that--this constant suspicion of Mr. Cicierega for keeping everything DIY and not wanting to climb the entertainment industry cursus honorum--might be more of a me problem.

RANKING: 20 of 26

Spirit Phone (2016)

7/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Chocolate Niblet Beans" by Toxic AKA Bob Barker. My personal vote for Greatest Animutation Of All Time; a non-stop cavalcade of beauty. Also happens to be the first "Randomutation", in which several elements of the animation would be randomized and appear differently every time you watched the video--watch for the ultra-rare iteration of this video that features Karen Carpenter. And it also helps that it's set to the greatest song in the history of recorded music, "Bicycle Race Remix by Plus-Tech Squeeze Box". Speaking of, this Animutation is linked to on the Naivepop Or Petitfool website with the caption "Flash that foreigner made without permission(..unexpectedly good... )".

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: I actually have no clue. This is maybe the period in my life when I was the least clued-in to internet bullshit. God I miss that. I wasn't even posting on rym all that much!

REVIEW: ~creakyboardz rec'd me this, and expressed surprise that I hadn't rated it. Let me tell you why.

See, I got on the Neil Cicierega train early. I credit Animutations as being a major influence on my aesthetic sense to this day. I knew all the words to "The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny" in eighth grade. The first time I got an mp3 player I filled it up with free tracks from Hip to the Javabean. I was even with him for the really stupid shit, like the diss track about ebaumsworld.com. And Mr. Cicierega has been kind of a constant cultural presence in my life ever since, even though I have never actually learned how to pronounce his name--I absolutely fucked with his mashup albums, for example. And yet... I kind of don't trust him. I don't know, I find it kind of suspect how consistently good at Being Online this guy has been. He truly is a man made of pure Internet, and like, is that really a good thing? (although it does make the lyrics to "Lifetime Achievement Award" and "Cabinet Man" kind of poignant)

And the thing about the Internet, and especially post-social-media Internet culture, is that it will always facilitate and privilege collage--the re-assembling of existing symbols into new configurations--over the creation of new art and new symbolic languages. This is how memes work, you know? It's no coincidence that Homestuck, the national epic of the Internet, has a visual aesthetic based around stolen google-image-searched jpeg assets. And that sort of pre-existing symbol play is Neil's wheelhouse, too. I mean, Animutation, the mashup albums, the aforementioned ultimate showdown etc. etc.... they're all just stuff we know and have seen before tossed together like a salad, you know? I will bolster my case here by saying that may favorite Cicierega singles are "Goosebumps", which is a love song made from the titles of Goosebumps books, and "Jaws", which is literally just the plot of Jaws. And of course this stuff can be great art, it can be the best art, and Neil is really good at it. But.

But. This is Neil Cicierega consciously trying to make a serious, original artistic statement, like his classic pop/rock heroes--it's even a concept album, for god's sake. And yet, all I hear is a gesture toward the idea of a nerdy, jittery synth-rock album, not the actual thing. This album is a pure signifier. Which is not to say it's bad. It's pretty good actually! There are things I like about it (the hooks, the dance-y beats) and things I don't (how busy the mix and the arrangements are, Neil's overly glammy vocals). But it feels hollow.

In closing, I will point out that Joanna Wang cited this album as major inspiration for her album Bob Music, which is an all-time fave of mine. And that's a truly original work of art right there, capturing the hormone-addled brain fog of adolescence in a way I've never seen before or since. Maybe Joanna Wang saw something in Spirit Phone that I can't--she's almost certainly much smarter than I am--or maybe it takes a pure signifier to point the way to something new. The map is not the territory, but you do need a map to not get lost in the territory.

EDIT: First of all, as ~oliviartist pointed out to me, Bob Music could not have been inspired by this album because it came out earlier than this--what happened was that I watched an interview with Ms. Wang where she credits Lemon Demon in general as an inspiration in general, and I misremembered her as citing this album. Maybe she was actually vibing to "Hyakugojyuuichi 2003" back in the day, who knows. Second... after having listened to a bunch of other Lemon Demon albums, I have come to the conclusion that what's happening here is that Neil, a guy who released his first album when he was fourteen, is performing adulthood here. Hence the 80s fixation--that's the decades grown-ups come from! And IDK. It does come off as a performance, in a way that none of his other albums do--for better or for worse he's always been fully himself. And ironically enough, doing an conscious performance of adulthood feels much less "mature" than, say, the meditative play of Dinosaurchestra or the nihilist goofiness of Nature Tapes. Some good tunes though! I'm particularly fond of "No Eyed Girl" and "I Earn My Life" and "Spiral of Ants".

RANKING: 12 of 26

SEE ALSO, KIND OF: How It Happened (To Us): 86 Albums From the End of the World, and 14 Albums by Charli XCX that Are Also From the End of the World, Which Adds Up to 100 Albums, Because This Is Commission 💯

Neil Cicierega - Mouth moods (2017)

8/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Nya Nya Nya" by Neil Cicierega. Apparently this was Drunk Magikoopa/dril's favorite Animutation.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: The YouTube recommendation algorithm started showing everyone a picture of 竹内まりや [Mariya Takeuchi], which made many white people, myself very much included, somewhat insufferable for a few years.

REVIEW: The Mouth series has four installments as of this writing, and I now feel comfortable in saying that its overall thesis is that pop music is... all just pop music, y'know? Take, for example, a track like "Dear Dinosaur"--"Dear Prudence" is one of those Beatles songs that people cry to, while "Walk the Dinosaur" is a goofy late 80s novelty, but fundamentally they're both pop songs, they are the same... and they are the same in that our brains interface with them, with the way they're structured, in the exact same way.

It's a fun concept, but it's the sort of thing that one would not think would be sustainable as a concept across four hour-long albums. Luckily: Neil is so good at this. At this album's highest point--the sublimely ridiculous "Annoyed Grunt"--the way he puts together the samples reminds me of the way Brain Wilson's arrangements on Pet Sounds. I still haven't actually listened to Mouth Dreams though.

RANKING: 6 of 26

SEE ALSO: To Like, Perchance to Subscribe: 20 Albums by YouTubers

Neil Cicierega - Spit Takes (2017)

6/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Fish Funk" by Flashbastard. I've never seen this one but apparently it's one of the best-known "adult" Animutations, like I think it has boobs? Who wants this. Actually, from the author's wiki entry: "Flashbastard was also somewhat controversial for his inflammatory opinions as well as his rather sexist nature. He and one of his many girlfriends Violet_Rainye got into a forum spat with Hibiscus Kazeneko which ended up getting both of them banned for some time." There are whole worlds out there.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Well it was actually a year later, but Neil didn't do anything in 2018, so: tumblr banned porn. Lots to say about this (the phrase "female-presenting nipples" will live forever in my mind, like imagine a nipple with a little pink bow on it), but I always just think... "internet culture" as we know it started on Usenet, right, but then you had two separate divergent (but occasionally intersecting) lineages: Usenet -> Livejournal -> tumblr -> twitter -> Bluesky on one hand, and Usenet -> forums -> imageboards -> twitter -> Discord. And fascinatingly Neil Cicierega is kind of part of both!

REVIEW: Mouth album outtakes. God there are so many of these. And I'm gonna say it: many of these songs didn't make it onto an official release for a reason. Sometimes they don't work super well musically ("Jocko No Mo", "Don't", "Man Piano" up until the Full House theme comes in), and sometimes they're just kind of a lame one-note joke ("Say it Ain't Socal", "(I) Sit on You", "Vengablood"... actually any one of them that depends on movie sound clips). There are some winners here too, though, so frustratingly you can't ignore this one. You've got:

• "Eugh", which isn't all that great in and of itself but which is interesting as a precursor to "Annoyed Grunt", which is maybe my favorite one of Neil's mashups;
• "Smash Christmas", "Zingle Ladies", and "Avril", which are all just bops;
• "Dragonfly a Milky Way", which was a big hit on YouTube, and which I am honestly surprised never made it onto an album--I guess it's one where you really need the visuals; and especially
• "Who", which is honestly the only fully-formed track on here, and which is great, like it's up there with the best of them.

Neil Cicierega - Not for Resale: A Video Game Store Documentary (2020)

8/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Leela Doo" by Mudi. I remember not enjoying this one very much. I think it's generally not a very good idea to make Animutations based on slow songs.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: There wasn't a global pandemic. Yet. Actually, I look back on the first two and a half months of 2020 as one of the strangest, least-real-feeling times I've ever experienced. I was still a paralegal back then and I would listen to パール・ピアス [Pearl Pierce] over and over again; I wasn't doing commissioned music reviews yet; my kids weren't born yet; I was still on speaking terms with my parents. Mass culture phenomena that were big included the Reply All episode "The Case of the Missing Hit" and the song "Yummy" by Justin Bieber.

REVIEW: Well. A few reviews ago I speculated about what it would be like if Neil Cicierega made an actual score for an actual film. And! It happened! Wow!

And it's really good, too. Definitely film score stuff--big synth washes, repetitive inspiring-sounding piano chords, little flute things--but very well-composed and crucially never boring, which is a big deal when you're listening to movie music without the movie. Actually, I can't believe I'm saying this--despite the fact that "Addictive Business" appears to quote from "Sports Men", this is a Neil Cicierega album where the best reference point is probably 坂本龍一 [Ryuichi Sakamoto]. Merry Christmas Mr. Mochrie.

RANKING: 11 of 26

Something Glowing EP (2020; recorded 2008)

7/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Yippee for KEYGEN!" by GraceJacques340. This was the most recently-created Animutation I could find. How recent? This thing is set to a song from Deltarune: Chapter 2. Yeah, this baby was uploaded on November 5, 2022--and since Flash was already several years in the grave by this point, it was made in Scratch. You know, Scratch, the programming language for kids with the cat. And its author was (according to her admittedly-self-written wiki page) was born on April 8, 2003, meaning that she is actually younger than Animutation as an art form. I really, really don't know what to make of this, but I am happy for her keeping the fire for a few years, and I hope she's doing okay wherever she is now.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: There was a global pandemic. So everything that was happening was happening online.

REVIEW: Needlejuice repackage/promo EP #1; the big draw of this one is that it come on glow-in-the-dark vinyl, in much the same way that the big draw of Earthbound was supposed to be that it came with scratch 'n' sniff stickers. Features a View-Monster track that's better than I remember it being, two tossed-off instrumentals, an electro Beatles cover, and a song built around All That samples. Can be yours for $15, which is equivalent to one and a half Something Awful forum account registrations.

RANKING: 15 of 26

Neil Cicierega - Mouth Dreams (2020)

7/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "The Fingertips Project", a collaborative project in which several different animutators--including Neil Cicierega, Toxic AKA Bob Barker, and a man named Keith Stack who would later find fame on twitter doing a webcomic that can best be described as "Beavis and Butthead but they're lesbians"--each made short Animutations to each of the segments of They Might Be Giants' "Fingertips". I remember it being... this very powerfully expression of community and togetherness. They use a live, power-ballad rendition of the "I Walk Along Darkened Corridors" segment at the end and it always gets me verklempt.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: There was a global pandemic. So I think Neil Cicierega thought that people needed something that felt comforting and nostalgic--nostalgic for 2014, when there wasn't a global pandemic.

REVIEW: I would argue that it made sense for there to be two Mouth albums, it made sense for there to be three Mouth albums, but it absolutely does not make any sense for there to be four. That's not a good number! I'm sorry it's just not!

Is this a good album? Um. It's a different album. With some exceptions--"Just a Baby" and "Ribs", which are also the best tracks on the album--the previous Cicierega mashup approach of layering a dizzying number of samples on top of one another to create a entirely new composition is gone here. No, what you mostly get here are either straightforward The Kleptones-style one-song-on-top-of-another mashups ("Fredhammer" and "Closerflies", both of which are really good; "Spongerock", which is one of the worst things Neil has ever done); wacky lyric swaps ("Where Is My Mom", "10,000 Spoons", both of which are intermittently amusing); and experiments with non-pop-music mashups ("Whitehouse", "Brithoven", and "Ain't", all of which i respect more than i enjoy). It's... genuinely very experimental, but again, not all experiments work. And that's okay!

I get the impression listening to this that making these mashups is what Neil Cicierega does to relax; this is his equivalent to, like, doing the Wordle or something. And the fact that this is all he's doing these days... well, I actually can't hate, because he's a parent now, and if there is one thing I know it is that if you have kids you are basically exhausted all the time. You've earned it Neil.

RANKING: 13 of 26

Neil Cicierega - Mouth Craft (2020)

8/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Wizard Power" by Neil Cicierega. The last Animutation Neil would ever make, and I consider there to be a pretty sharp delineation between Animutations made before this one and ones made after. Interestingly, that point comes in late 2003, so right before Hip to the Javabean--one wonders whether giving up Animutation was something Neil had to do in order to really get serious about music. Also by far his most complex and technically sophisticated creation. Maybe someday Neil will return to Animutation, in much the same way that one day maybe Taylor Swift will make another country album.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: There was a global pandemic. So people would play "concerts" in Minecraft, which is a video game. This is apparently a recording of one of those. The one I remember hearing about the most was 100 gecs' Square Garden.

REVIEW: Whereas the existence of this thing makes perfect sense. So much of the comedy of these mashups comes from the element of surprise--what the fuck, he's including that song???--and so I would imagine it would actually kill in a pseudo-live setting where everyone's coming in spoiler-free. Would stuff like "Help", or the absolutely sublime "The Kidz Are Taking Over", or the Full House theme coming in on "Monster Parade" work nearly as well if you knew what was coming? Plus, this thing flows super well--it's basically an uninterrupted 20-minute suite--and so you can just kinda groove to it. Is Neil Cicierega a rock star? I don't know, but he is one in Minecraft.

RANKING: 8 of 26

Acrobat Unstable Record EP (2022; recorded 2006)

4/10

⭐⭐⭐⭐

CLASSIC ANIMUTATION: "Hyakugojyuuichi Forever" by Andrew "TMST" Kepple. Which also happens to be the official music video for the song "Hyakugojyuuichi 2003" by Lemon Demon.

WHAT ELSE WAS HAPPENING ONLINE?: Neil's last Animutation "Wizard Power" specifically came out on September 17, 2003, while (as of press time) Neil's last real album Mouth Dreams came out on September 30, 2020--almost seventeen years later to the day. And Neil was seventeen years old when he made "Wizard Power"! There is a literal lifetime between "Wizard Power" and Mouth Dreams. And that lifetime was something that happened online.

REVIEW: Needlejuice repackage/promo EP #2. Is Lemon Demon K-pop? It's unclear. What you got here is a demo version of standout Dinosaurchestra track "Indie Cindy and the Lo-Fi Lullabies" that sounds like something off the first They Might Be Giants album (complete with noise outro!); a Trapezoid-ass MIDI instrumental; a novelty song that ironically enough has actually probably gotten a lot funnier now that none of its cultural references are relevant anymore; a stupid novelty song about space; "Bill Watterson" at its proper length; and a stupid pointlessly-edgy randomsauce novelty song about leprechauns.

And. There is something to be said about how pretty much all of Neil Cicierega's art is about the post-end-of-history cultural stagnation that's been brought about by the pop culture industry's endless repackaging of "nostalgic" media. And now people are, in fact, doing that very thing to Neil Cicierega's own work. Hey, do you remember Dinosaurchestra? Do you remember Potter Puppet Pals? Do you remember Animutation?

RANKING: 22 of 26


MP3S I DOWNLOADED BACK IN THE DAY: That demo version of "Bill Watterson"! It's on vinyl now! Crazy.

Overall Ranking & Final Thoughts

1. Deporitaz - Miscellaneous (again, not an album, but mods please don't delete it or this list won't make any sense)
2. Deporitaz - Circa 2000
3. Trapezoid - Microwave This CD
4. Potter Puppet Pals - S/T
5. Lemon Demon - Acrobat Unstable Record
6. Lemon Demon - Live from the Haunted Candle Shop
7. Neil Cicierega - Computer Fighters
8. Trapezoid - Outsmart
9. Trapezoid - Dimes
10. Neil Cicierega - Spit Takes
11. Lemon Demon - Damn Skippy
12. Lemon Demon - Something Glowing
13. Lemon Demon - Clown Circus
14. Neil Cicierega - Mouth Dreams
15. Lemon Demon - Spirit Phone
16. Neil Cicierega - Not for Resale
17. Lemon Demon - Live (Only Not)
18. Lemon Demon - I Am Become Christmas
19. Neil Cicierega - Mouth Craft
20. Lemon Demon - View-Monster
21. Neil Cicierega - Mouth Moods
22. Neil Cicierega - Mouth Sounds
23. Neil Cicierega - Mouth Silence (in case you need a summary, my ranking of the mainline Mouth albums goes Silence > Sounds > Moods > Dreams)
24. Lemon Demon - Hip to the Javabean
25. Lemon Demon - Dinosaurchestra
26. Lemon Demon - Nature Tapes

But don't take my word for it! rym users ~therapodherapod and ~JAMOOL have an excellent video discussing the Lemon Demon discography, which I really hope did not bias my ratings. Check it out! And ~therapodherapod/Matt B would later meet Neil, and report that he is very nice in real life.