Moody!

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[6.50]

Iain Mew: The future sounds awfully squawky! The sonic aggression actually doesn’t wear out its welcome in the same way that the lyrical aggression does though, because for all its repetition it’s so much more tightly focussed. The fantastic sudden ending is worth a mark on its own.
[6]

Brad Shoup: I take my bile without the sarcasm generally, but El’s still on that “Triumph” shit, so yay. The bass sounds like it’s being pushed through a rusty mailslot, but it’s still not enough disease to carry the vision. Thank goodness for the stabs of the third verse; finally we can hear some future New York crumbling.
[7]

Pete Baran: Luckily, despite many of the trappings of deliberately difficult hip-hop (a loop which gets old quickly, a stilted confrontational attitude) there is much more to “The Full Retard.” Although it plods, the rhymes are good, there is good machine gun sampling, and the extended “harmony and love section” really invigorates a track which had threatened to get old too quickly. Bonus mark for ending with the words “post-haste.”
[6]

Alfred Soto: El-P’s going for some Bomb Squad shit: squeals, trumpet samples, laser beams, scratches. The aural assault finds a match in his voice, which is best when stabbing and hectoring. 
[7]

Anthony Easton: On the edge of full weirdness, and aggressively anti-utopian, even with the peace-and-love stoned-out chorus. Ii appreciate the anger of it, and even the explicit contempt it has for the audience — but it could risk having a bit more; seems a little too convinced of its own bad-assery.
[6]

Jonathan Bogart: Okay, so here’s what ran through my head while listening to this song: the fact that “full retard” is a reference to a supposedly outrageous piece of Hollywood satire in a middling Ben Stiller vehicle; the fact that, as I just learned (again?) (for the first time?), El-P is white; something about how hip-hop encodes and enforces certain narrow parameters of masculine performance, so that even when a given song isn’t about violent dominance and sexual satisfaction the tropes of braggadocio, technical mastery, and authoritativeness are all still inextricably coded as — as more than one person noted over this weekend, with that indulgent smile — “boy stuff.”
[7]