Review: Dev Lemons Remakes Songs With The Volume Off
★★★★★
I recently became aware of Dev Lemons by way of the whims of the YouTube Algorithm -- a collab with someone else I've been watching for a while. I bounced over to her her Dev Limes channel (Dev Lemons being her solo music project, Dev Limes being her silly channel) after listening to some of her music and realized that I had seen these thumbnails before. She has done a bunch of these videos, of her recreating popular songs in Logic Pro with the sound off on her computer. I had not clicked on any of them, for no particular reason. This day, I decided why not.
This is, without exaggeration, the most that I have laughed in years. She has discovered Guaranteed Comedy Magic with A Few Weird Tricks. She weaponizes dramatic irony by letting the viewer hear every loop and note choice while she is making the song, while she can't hear. Her inexplicable A-plot/B-plot style editing gives her sense of humor and storytelling ability space to breathe while impeccably timed cuts are part of the joke. She has never encountered a bit to which she will not commit 200%.
The point is not to recreate the song to sound correct. Or, well, it is, but that wouldn't really be that fun if it always happened, would it? Despite lowkey betraying a sharp knowledge of music theory, through naive loop decisions and miscalculations in silence, her recreation is more often than not a disaster to listen to. But inside of that disaster is often a fleeting moment of beauty. It might only last a few seconds, and it might require muting all but a few stems, but there's a there there, and it's nothing that any human being would have ever produced on purpose.
Most importantly, though, I think she is extremely funny. Her persona is aggressive and absurd and it makes me laugh so hard that my abs hurt. This would be my favorite sketch in an entire season of I Think You Should Leave.
A good place to start: I Made "Somebody That I Used To Know" by Gotye Without Hearing It