Review Summary: the kind of B.S. people pretend to enjoy for l33t cred
Imagine for a minute that you’re awoken, in the early hours of the morning, to the sound of a city under siege by an unidentified, but very potent threat. Weary from sleep deprivation and yet to comprehend the enormity of what is happening, you stumble over to the nearest window, while your eyes adjust to the faint ambient light that bathes your surroundings. Peering through the glass, you’re greeted by a sky tinted orange from the pending sunrise, as well as hordes of people trekking the streets in unison to an undisclosed destination. Confusion is compounded by air raid sirens and grainy, indecipherable public alerts, spoken with an eerily calm and somewhat disinterested tone. Venturing outside, any attempt to get a response from the crowd or understand the situation proves futile, and you find yourself involuntarily caught in the centre of the march, forced into the clutches of the unknown, and the potentially hostile.
Ambient music – and dark ambient, by extension – relies as much on one’s intuition as it does a specific theme or narrative, sometimes functioning entirely on what the listener projects onto it. Nevertheless, Samuel Kerridge’s latest opus
Always Offended Never Ashamed is unusually depictive for a product of the ambient world, evoking thoughts of imminent peril within expansive settings that stretch well past the proverbial horizon. Such tangible imagery is a minor rarity for a genre that is frequently lauded for its openness to interpretation, and Kerridge achieves this through the use of sparse, militaristic percussion, clever modulation, as well as an overall sound that can only be described as massive and reverberant. Loud, ominous drones that sound like huge, infrasonic foghorns envelop the listener, while Kerridge interjects with his monotone, authoritative voice, albeit under a veil of distortion and feedback. “Post-apocalyptic” is a term that is frequently and erroneously used to describe albums of a darker persuasion, but the vibe on
Always Offended Never Ashamed is decidedly pre-emptive. There are no points at which chaos erupts and the looming horror materialises. Instead, you’re constantly poised in anticipation, and thus the atmosphere stems from a sense of mystery, exacerbated by hints at a potential climax that never actually arrives.
Of course, such an interpretation is by no means definitive, and what one individual takes from this album needn’t be too consistent with that of another. However, while details of first-hand accounts always tend to vary, similarities will appear given enough scope.
Always Offended Never Ashamed is like a soundtrack to suspenseful disaster film – well-paced, detailed and sonically imposing – laying the conceptual foundation upon which our most frightening ideas come to fruition. It’s simply up to the listener to fill in the blanks.
