Connor Kennedy
Connector Contributor

Internet culture moves very quickly. Jokes and people that were huge one year can fade into total obscurity by the next, but there are some who maintain relevance long after their initial debut.

Neil Cicierega is one such person, most well-known for his creation of the “Potter Puppet Pals” series nine years ago. They are still his most popular works by far, but he has remained active ever since with videos like the infamous “BRODYQUEST.” Over the past two years though, he has developed in a more musical direction with his “Mouth” trilogy of mashup albums.

“Mouth Moods” is Cicierega’s third mashup album after “Mouth Silence” and “Mouth Sounds.” It starts off with the explosive track “The Starting Line,” featuring samples from no less than 16 different songs. It is not hard to find songs online that mix two tracks, usually taking the vocals of one and the instruments of the other, but “The Starting Line” has much more ambitious goals.

To do this, it draws on a pool of common music that just about everybody knows, from tracks like “One Week” by Barenaked Ladies to Cake’s “The Distance” and many more. Not everyone will know every track, but everyone should know at least a couple.

The song achieves some great humor because it takes songs common and familiar and places them in a bizarre mismatched collage with each other. Vocals from Foo Fighters, Montell Jordan, Smash Mouth and more get laid over each other in a way that creates something strangely new from music that is well-known.
The choice of such ubiquitous tracks is essential to the song. Had less popular tracks been picked, then the song would have come out as a totally incomprehensible hodge podge. Not only are popular tracks used, but the most iconic moments from them are taken to make them easily recognizable from the overall mixture.

Also, the song is expertly mixed together. There are never too many vocals being combined that cannot be understood, and less dense moments punctuate the song to prevent the listener from being overwhelmed. Mixing in a way that does not sound discordant or messy is a quite difficult task and doing it on the level of “The Starting Line” is truly impressive.

It is not hard to find mashups online of just two songs that do not sound quite right because of a lack of attention to subtle details. Slight changes in pitch, small shifts in tempo, equalizing of the audio, all of this is necessary to a good mashup and it is all on display throughout the album as a whole, but especially in the opening track.

After this strong opening, the album shifts into less ambitious, although still quite well made, territory. “Floor Corn,” “AC/VC,” “Revolution #5” and “Dear Dinosaur” all rely on simple but extreme examples of juxtaposition using a couple of well-known pieces. “300 MB” uses a particularly strange mix of a woefully outdated advertisement for the “massive” storage space of a 300 MB hard drive with The Proclaimers’ “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles).”

The majority of the album uses a straightforward formula of taking a couple songs with very different tonal feelings for comedy, but with enough similarity in musical structure that the mix actually sounds good. “T.I.M.E.” is an excellent example of this, taking Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” and mixing it with Hanz Zimmer’s “Time.” The vocals of “Y.M.C.A.” have never sounded so dramatic and grandiose as they do in Cicirega’s work.

There are some tracks though which seek humor through other means, such as “Bustin” and “Tiger.” They swap the lyrics around within a single song to create an absurd albeit still somewhat coherent narrative, much the same way as the popular remix “Mom’s Spaghetti” does. Then there is “Annoyed Grunt.”

“Annoyed Grunt” takes after “The Starting Line,” but goes in an even stranger direction. Rather than a focus on popular lines and words, it focuses on popular “noises” instead. It has the infamous “oh wa ah ah ah” from Disturbed’s “Down With the Sickness,” “mmms” of Mungo Jerry’s “In The Summertime,” and more all bound together overall by the Tim Allen “aeuughs!” from Home Improvement.

It really makes one aware of the little, sometimes silly seeming parts of a song that really stick with people. This almost universal knowledge of the strangest little bits of songs makes them a valuable common source for jokes ranging from terrible puns to preposterous remixes like this one.

The album overall does suffer from the limitations of being based wholly on remixing the work of others. It depends on the listener’s familiarity with the material being used in order to really drive home the absurdity of its combinations. Its greatest strength is the power of this commonly shared pool of music, so deeply ingrained in American culture, but may also be one of its greatest weaknesses. It is like a great topical comedy routine: hilarious in its own right, but unlikely to ever become a classic.

The music also relies heavily on the element of surprise as much humor, and thus it will likely become stale after a few listens. Some may dismiss it as nothing more than a piece of goofy nonsense, and that may be true, but it is a remarkably well crafted piece of goofy nonsense.
This music has the power to unite people, at least for a moment, not through a common code or creed, but through a shared knowledge of top 40s hit songs that have been played incessantly on the road for years.