Review Summary: Grooves that make you moved
Ok lets get the boring stuff out of the way. The instrumentation is kept mostly as a rock band would do it with live guitars and drums, although there’s a good helping of synths and organs that fill out the sound. That being said, the music enters repetitive, psychedelic, and surreal soundscapes that reminds me of ambient music at times. These aren’t necessarily unique notions within music, even this strain of indie rock, but I think where this music really shines through is with the way it approaches emotion, mixing deadpan vocal delivery with numbingly, arrestingly beautiful arrangements and composition.
One distinct way the album achieves this is the unique chord voicings of the (usually double tracked) guitar on the songs. These chord voicings feature on pretty much every song on here but just to highlight a few examples, “Solaris” and “This Circle Dissolves Humans”. Truthfully I just find the particular chords he uses to be really pretty, and the pretty atmosphere they create is comforting to me. This atmosphere is augmented by the keyboards and unique (busy and weirdly funky) rhythm section.
This album is unique in the way that most great albums are, it has a good vision and utilizes good writing to realize it, namely the chord progressions built around great chord voices and also really impressive arrangements. To that end, this album has a ton, and I mean a TON of tricks up its sleeve arrangement-wise. In one of the songs the drums randomly straight up start going backwards for like half a bar and its over before you know it but its an amazing transition into another part of the song. That happens on the “heavy rocker” of the album “Grey Ghost Rides Again”, opening with a sick AF riff, but before long the song shows its true colors through the constant flow of one cycle of chords moving to another and the arrangement being quick to follow, playing with the change in atmosphere from one part to the next. This is typical of how tracks on the album tend to flow, although there are some exceptions where songs like “Junk Shop” are content to simmer in place.
For all these switchups and disparate parts having a different atmosphere, not one time does a song lose its gravitas. Songs flick from one groove to another, sometimes more than once, with each part of the song carrying the feel and complementing the energy of the previous section. Like in “Gravity Eye”, a busy-funky-percussive groove that flicks into a slow triplet jam. In one sense this transition completely catches the listener off guard but before you can even process it, the energy is carried over so well in the new section that the lack of warning doesn’t even matter, since none of the atmosphere of the song is changed whatsoever. Eventually the drums just stop and you might not even notice that they stopped until a little after, the song just fades away in ambient bliss. I think that the sudden transition is a major upside here, since the listener didn’t even see it coming and is now forced to open up a little emotionally and just let the beautiful chords do their thing.
This also happens in “An End”, twice, first from the lethargic, depressive jam to a floaty, heart-grabbing guitar hook, then finally a content little jam. Rawr.
What I’m getting at here is that Jason uses this trick in almost every song on this album, and it’s a very effective way of conveying emotions that are kind of hard to convey with a feeling of “realness” and “seriousness” to somebody. But the arrangement and the utter beauty with which Jason manages to trip the listener up with these awesome transitions is a great trick to achieve that. It’s a great idea but it really needs the right vision and songwriting chops to back it up, and he demonstrates here that he definitely has them.
