Review Summary: Call it the Leyland Kirby paradox: the more obviously unsettling one renders their music, the less haunting and affecting it is
Call it the Leyland Kirby paradox: the more obviously unsettling one renders their music, the less haunting and affecting it is. Stage 4 of Kirby's Everywhere at the End of Time series, documenting the process of dementia as it worsens, is by far the most tonally bleak of the installments, and abruptly so. Though there were hints of pretty melodies getting distorted, winks of dismal ambient fog, in the forerunners, 4 takes it to a new level of emotional desolation. Listening to this album is plunging into a hell borne not of the uncanny but of inevitable human decay, and I have no doubt Kirby has done his research and that this terrifying muddle of crackle, barely restrained noise and glisters of Dixieland listened to long ago, presumably when the days were sunnier, accurately portrays this stage of Alzheimers (as the song titles make clear, "Post Awareness Confusions", with a "Temporary Bliss State" thrown in just to disconcert the listener even more). Temporary Bliss State, judiciously placed in the middle, emphasises the ephemerality of anything that could be construed as happiness or lucidity. The only experience I can compare it to is saying goodbye to someone for what you know to be the last time; any kind of happiness then, if not wholly ersatz, is at least leavened by knowledge of the inevitable. Kirby is throwing everything at you here, playing up the dramatic irony of your awareness of the protagonists plight while he, if he once knew it, can no longer remember it.
It doesn't work.
That isn't to say I don't like the music -- mentioning glitch with elements of British Big Band and noisy, crackly overtones generates a Pavlovian response of salivation in your correspondent -- but which is to say it doesn't work conceptually. The reason for this is threefold:
1) why this doesn't work for me is why I didn't cry in The Notebook (another cultural artefact with a cloying, histrionic take on dementia): one can feel the creator beyond the music, pulling the strings, desperate to elicit a desired reaction. I feel that it's the task of any artist to meet the audience halfway and, if they want to beguile, make it clever and nuanced. The presence of Kirby on this album is overbearing; one gets the feeling if he could reach from beyond the screen and prick you with a pin to really get the tears flowing, he would.
2) I adore two of Kirby's previous records under his Caretaker moniker -- An Empty Bliss, obviously, but also the third installment of this series, but I find them excruciatingly difficult to listen to in full, more so than most extreme music, because it's hard to locate where they disorient and haunt. The slow, gradual loss of lucidity and identity, a kind of piecemeal decay that is so imperceptible one wouldn't be able to remember where they began while retaining core aspects of self... that, for me, is terrifying, and much more terrifying than listening to a landscape of post-apocalyptic drones and cheesy radio interjections. An Empty Bliss asks me how i got here, how have i changed, how will i change, where did I go wrong. I'm not sure I can answer. This album asks me to consider what utter confusion looks like and then hammers the answer home to me with the subtlety of toddler flinging food at their parents. It's not much fun, apparently. While I don't disagree, I'm not exactly challenged to come to that answer.
3) The Caretaker's best work has always uncannily integrated loss of cultural memory into personal memory. Dixieland and British Big Band -- the two genres he loves to use as source material - used to play before scores of dancing, laughing listeners in lush, opulent ballrooms. These ballrooms now stand empty, collecting dust. The dances exist only in a lucky few's memories, and even then tucked away in recesses, nooks and crannies. How previously ubiquitous genres have fallen into disrepair, how cultural movements have been allowed to fade out of the only thing that matters -- memory -- is a preoccupation of his and mine, and it is a haunting one because it behooves the question: what else have we lost? By the nature of the question we can't know, and this integration transforms his work from "haunting" into "indelible".
Everywhere at the End of Time 4 is neither. There are plenty of fine albums about decay - Mark Templeton's Heart trilogy, The Disintegration Loops, Meadowlark, and, weirdly, Burial's self-titled (those two artists share another commonality; where Kirby dwells in forgotten ballrooms and salons, Burial lives in the cultural memory of 90s rave and dub culture: both of them return to the present to find them empty, devoid of anything corporeal of only spectres of a past we'll never revive) come to mind -- and all of them do it by being subtle, clever and cohesive. In trying to be disjointed, difficult and miserable, Kirby has succeeded. In trying to be poignant or affecting, he has failed: the irony, that I know this because I can listen to it without verging on panic, is yet another quirk of dealing with such a difficult topic through art. While the intentions are laudable, the execution is as confused as the subject matter.
