5 out of 5

Label: Dense Truth

Produced by: Zurkas Tepla

Harsh, stunning, mysterious.  That this found a home on a label named Dense Truth is fitting.

This worked two ways for me, each way making the other even more rewarding.  There’s the write up on Bleep that got me to buy it, which talks of matching an intended narrative with the song titles (which are more like snapshot descriptions, e.g. Shooting. Bleeding. Dead bodies.); and there’s the music itself, of course, which is a patchwork mix of Radian-esque clatter with faintly ambient textures and then sudden and shocking flourishes, be it beats or orchestral swoons.  I’d forgotten there was a “story” when I got around to listening to this, and though I’ll say it took a headphone swap to really hear the details (not an intended swap for that purpose; just happenstance), once the layers were apparent, I was swept up in this thing, caught listening when my focus really should’ve been on other things.  But when music is grabbing, that’s a damned good thing.

When I glanced at the track titles to see what was what, I recalled the whole Bleep thing, and then started syncing up the feelings I was getting from the album with the tale told in the titles of, in the Bank Robber tracks, a heist that ends in a shoot-out, and on the Same Car tracks, a – perhaps – outsider observation of a wreck.  Are these connected?  Is this / was this a car involved in the robbery?  There are some slight thematic connections, particularly in the way the concluding tracks from each section swoon between stillness and sudden surges of emotion, both otherwise there’s this alluring inscrutability that makes it hard to tell what side of things you’re on, here: a viewer; a participant; a good guy; a bad guy.  The narrative seems to get lost in the penultimate track of each side, but in both cases, it’s an appropriate calm before a relative storm.

This is fantastically complex stuff; electronic music with a beat that manages to be completely abstracted, conjuring up a multiple-perspective concept, and still functional as head bobbing rhythms.