Smartphones are everywhere, and you can still catch a glimpse of a flip phone now and then, courtesy of the “dumphone” resurgence. But have you considered the slimephone? Its receiver oozes with Nickelodeon green slime, its frayed cord sparking. It emits fiery drumbeats and squelching guitar riffs, dispatches from another dimension, where radioactive sludge greases the lanes of a grimy blacklight bowling alley flanked by analog VCRs and camcorders that flicker with static, sentience and sound.
It’s the world of Slimephone Surveillance, Des Moines punk rockers Greg Wheeler and the Poly Mall Cops’ sophomore effort.
All of the phone analogies and analog aesthetics throughout the album — which carry over to the cover art and moody music videos — are more than creative album worldbuilding. The archaic sound of dial-up internet boots up the title track “Slimephone Surveillance (You Can’t Hide),” before vocalist Greg Wheeler cackles, “You can’t hide from me… I even watch you when you’re not home.”
“I’m coming for you, Zuckerburg!” is belted out at the top of “Bile Blaster,” before launching into a panicked fuzzed-out guitar riff and a raucous diatribe on losing oneself and taking from others when the price is right.
Conceptually, Slimephone Surveillance delivers a timely warning around technology surveillance, ill intentions and a general bitterness towards a fraught political climate — all packaged in throwback, greasy garage punk. As bone-chilling as it is hypnotic, the long-standing Iowa trio knows how to write a cohesive, catchy chorus. Wheeler is accompanied by a healthy dose of entrancing basslines from Jill McLain-Mesiter and barreling beats from drummer Hutch.
But where a lesser group’s pursuit of earworms might result in sanded down cotton candy radio-pop songs, these songs are of a slimey variety. They carry all the same mechanisms of a catchy melody, but they deliver said melody by burrowing into your brain, seeping into its labyrinth like a wad of gum in the tread of a shoe, or the chasms of a world physically cracking from corporate greed.
Though the album rarely lets up its unrelenting, driving pace, there’s a delicate balance of measured choice at play — the wistful and clever lyrics of “Fernweh” (“Felt so alive, then I went to sleep”) run slightly longer than minute-long tracks like “Exoteric,” which bursts through with polish and tight delivery (after first appearing on the band’s much looser live recording Live at the Lift).
Most striking is the somber, sparse ending meditation on the loss of a friend with “Your Quiet Charm” (“I think about you often / Lying in your coffin”). The fully realized and matured Slimephone Surveillance careens and crowd-surfs through 20 minutes of sonically scorched earth. How many albums boast a Slime FX credit? Now that’s punk.
