Review Summary: Smells like something died in here.
I’ve never experienced a time in my life where I simply wasn’t interested in music. In the last month though, I had difficulty finding myself interested in anything. I’m not a nihilist, but it’s hard to not to question the point of existence in the face of the destruction that Mother Nature can wreak—and even in saying that, it’s hard to blame Mother Nature entirely. Weather patterns are easy to predict and fires go hand in hand with dry winds in Los Angeles, so it’s almost impossible that people didn’t know that one hundred mile per hour winds weren’t liable to cause a fire. But no, the reservoir in the Pacific Palisades was empty, power lines were left on, and over ten thousand structures burned to the ground.
How could it happen? It’s f*cking 2025. How can you try to improve the lives of the people you love or the world at large or even yourself, when we live in a system that is so broken that the single most destructive fire in the history of the United States of America just occurred at a time when we have more technology on how to prevent such a situation than we ever have? How can the leader of your city be in another country entirely, knowing the city she is responsible for is at severe risk of fire? How come the reservoir was empty? How come people aren’t allowed back to their homes as immediately as possible? How?
Do you see what I mean? I’m not trying to turn a review into an album into a dissertation on the failings of my local government or why fire is bad. I’m painting a picture of the mental state such a situation can leave a person in. What do you do? After weeks of nothing but the worst possible news and the most heart-wrenching stories imaginable, I found it hard to care about a lot of things. I was doing something about it from where I could, but there was a small part of me that had to ask—why bother?
Listening to
Never Exhale was almost cathartic in a way. Sonically and thematically, I felt a strange sense of relief in embracing the inherent despair present in Ditz’s songwriting and lyrics. I don’t need to articulate what “post-punk noise blah blah” sounds like. You all know what it is. The main quality that makes this album memorable is the way it seesaws from peaceful to heated to despairing to desperately angry. From the first moment all the way through the final curtain drop,
Never Exhale puts the listener in a choke hold and never lets go—and while it may not make you feel better, at least you know someone else feels the same way you do.
The effects, walls of noise, sharp changes in tonality and song structure are engaging and well-executed. Despite stretches of atmospheric passages and droning instrumentals,
Never Exhale doesn’t ever feel boring. It is deliberate without being robotic, and creates an introspectively bleak mood throughout the record.
Layered on top of that moody atmosphere are small, attention-grabbing details that are (for the most part) excellently well-placed. While there are many, a couple of good examples include the beat at the beginning of “Taxi Man,” or the ending of “18 Wheeler” in which the track alternates between silence and chaotic tones. The closing track, “britney” blends all of it together, taking the listener on a seven minute journey through the soundscapes that covered the rest of the album.
All of that being said, however, while
Never Exhale has the kind of potential to be one of those albums that defines the year, it never quite reaches the highs that it feels like it should. Aside from “britney,” the record has several stretches of feeling somewhat lost in its own attempts at being brilliant. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an excellent album, it just doesn’t quite seem to rise up to the expectations it sets for itself.
All in all though, while I know it’s a bit cheesy or sentimental, I listened to Never Exhale in a time where I couldn’t bring myself to listen to anything, and I’m glad I did. The album blows the curtain back and shows you that some things are just f*cked, and leaves you open on how you want to deal with it. I know how I did.