Review Summary: Can't Tell If Joke Album, Or...
The Former World, The Former World. The cover looks as though it was shamelessly taken from a mythology picture book. As for the contents? An amalgamation of sprawling, wildly out-of-tune, acoustic guitar picking that sounds like it's being played by a retarded chipmunk, sugar-coated with B-grade field recordings - all crowned with pretentious song titles whose only purpose is meant to be "ironic". Irony. What are the conventions of the word? A sense of surprise and bafflement? The aesthetic element injected with the absurd? Maybe the essential element I'm trying to grope at is indeed a sense of the absurd. Because that is exactly what you'll find in the light of The Former World. No, I don't mean absurd, in the existential sense. It's just plain absurd.
My friend was urging me to write a review about this album, who knows the moniker of The Former World from volunteering in Ecuador. I believe he's being mentored by a shaman, or some mystical drivel. Given the hallmarks of his character - a scrawny tiger-eyed radical who wears thick-rimmed glasses and always wears a Greek fisherman's cap - I've confirmed my suspicions from the onset - an overly pretentious counter-culture snob who likes to tell you what's cool and what sucks. With song titles that confess all the pretension of a post-modern armchair philosopher, song titles such as Sisyphus Olympics, Lord Of Cheerios and Fly Pie - a sense of adventure is anticipated, but fails to deliver. With twenty-odd tracks of sprawling non-sense, I have hardly ever been so crippled with impatience at a given piece of music. I'm quite certain that to him, anyways, this album perfectly resembles the satisfaction of popping a grease-caked zit that has been accumulating puss for the past month or so. The reveling of catharsis. You, however, want to avoid it at all costs. There is nothing worse than when one of these Jordowski-worshiping hippie clones attempts at making "experimental music".
However, the only shard of beauty that possibly exists in this collection of "songs" is when you’re inebriated to the point of zero judgment. Only then, perhaps, eternal diamond.
