Zach Tabori’s Attack of the Clout Chasers is what happens when a prog-rock gremlin reads too much Guy Debord, gets permanently brain-wormed by late capitalism, and decides the only way to cope is to record a concept album using jazz musicians, conspiracy boards, and a very large hammer.
This isn’t an album. It’s an act of ideological violence against the Spotify autoplay algorithm. A musically dense, thematically unhinged cry for help that also shreds. It’s a sonic pamphlet for the terminally online. Specifically, the kind of person who owns three copies of The Society of the Spectacle and uses them to prop up a vintage Moog synthesizer. Clout Chasers doesn’t want to be streamed. It wants to be handed to you in a USB drive hidden inside a Fabergé egg, while a man in a trench coat whispers, “You’re not ready.” And frankly, you probably aren’t.
The opener, “ROTTEN,” lulls you in with acoustic guitar and what sounds like someone serenading their own nervous breakdown. It’s soft. It’s sad. It’s the kind of track that makes you suspicious. Like, what’s the catch? And then, like clockwork, the album kicks open the door and screams “THE NUCLEAR APOCALYPSE IS ALSO A VIBE”, launching you headfirst into “NANN RAY,” a track that sounds like if Godspeed You! Black Emperor discovered MIDI files and unresolved childhood trauma. It’s a sci-fi epic made by someone who thinks Threads was a bit too subtle and wishes Philip Glass did more work with bass clarinets.
By the time you get to “THIN WHITE SHIRT,” the album is no longer trying to seduce you. It’s actively judging you for your Spotify Wrapped. The song unpacks performative masculinity like a therapist who moonlights as a stand-up comic, all while vibraphones screech in the background like they’re trying to warn you about your own emotional repression. It’s either genius or a dare. Maybe both.
Then there’s “JAZZ TO SHOWCASE OUR MUSICIANSHIP,” which, and I cannot stress this enough, is exactly what it says. It is jazz. It does showcase the musicianship. It also sounds like the band is trapped in a recording booth with the ghost of Miles Davis and a PowerPoint presentation titled “Why We’re Better Than You.” You can practically hear the smugness. And somehow, it rules.
The guest list reads like a fever dream: Dweezil Zappa shows up and immediately peels off a guitar solo so unnecessarily technical it may have violated several labor laws. Rachel Eckroth arrives to provide the kind of piano work that makes you feel like your fingers have wasted their lives. And Sharada Shashidhar contributes vocals so ethereal you’d swear the track had astral projected. Meanwhile, ballet dancers appear. Yes, actual ballet dancers. Because this album apparently takes place in an alternate universe where genre boundaries are for cowards and subtlety is a war crime.
And here’s the thing: Zach Tabori isn’t just dabbling in different genres. He’s mugging them in the alley and wearing their clothes like trophies. Psych-rock, musique concrète, big band jazz, string sections, spoken word interludes that feel like a paranoid YouTuber found a thesaurus: it’s all here. “TALIBAN BOOGIE” manages to be a groove and a thinkpiece about the military-industrial complex, like if Rage Against the Machine had to pass a jazz theory final or be executed. “JFK” basically turns the Kennedy administration into a concept album about the American death drive, which is admittedly a very bold move for a song that still goes this hard.
And then there’s “END OF THE FUCKING WORLD,” a track so dramatic it probably legally counts as an opera. It comes complete with a ballet, because of course it does. Not only that, it feels like the ballet is being performed by ghosts in a collapsing theater while the orchestra is slowly being replaced with malfunctioning robots. It’s Aaron Copland meets Blade Runner meets a TED Talk about entropy, and yes, it slaps.
For all its chaotic brilliance, the album has the audacity to be… heartfelt. It’s not just showing off. It’s not all irony and spectacle. Beneath the whiplash transitions and baroque instrumentation is a core of actual emotional sincerity. Clout Chasers doesn’t just want to blow your mind; it wants you to feel things. Like grief, and rage, and maybe a little hope, buried under six layers of distortion and saxophone.
This is the real power move. In a world of cynical cash-grab singles and TikTok-friendly choruses, Zach Tabori has made an album so maximalist, so unmarketable, and so deeply personal that it circles all the way back around to being necessary. Clout Chasers is a rebuke to mediocrity. It’s an audio essay on cultural collapse delivered by a prog-rock warlock who refuses to chill. It’s the kind of album that dares you to understand it and rewards you for even trying.
In short: Attack of the Clout Chasers by Zach Tabori is like if someone made an elaborate pie chart about how everything is terrible, but did it in crayon, while on fire, and then turned it into a musical. It shouldn’t work. It barely does. And yet, it’s one of the most compelling things you’ll hear this side of the apocalypse.
And if you don’t like it? That’s fine. You’re just wrong.
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About the Author
A tenured media critic known working as a ghost writer, freelance critic for publications in the US and former lead writer of Atop The Treehouse. Reviews music, film and TV shows for media aggregators.
