3 out of 5

Label: 54’40 or Fight!

Produced by: Adam Selzer (engineered by)

When I first heard Pseudosix – when I first heard Days of Delay – I was absolutely swept up by the moodiness of it.  The quiet acoustic pluckings interrupted by thundering drums hit me in the gut in a good way, with the snippets of cold lyrics that I would hear really working to paint a pleasingly desolate picture that made the album temporarily top o’ the pops for me.  But it didn’t last.  Later, with the group’s second release, I found myself relistening to Days and feeling like it didn’t stack up to the more intricate and developed sophomore album; later later, when lead Tim Perry formed the even more fully realized Agesandages, the discrepancy became that much clearer.

Returning to it now, it confirms that feeling: Days of Delay comes across as sketches – both lyrically and musically – of themes and techniques that the band / Perry would later hone.  The lyrics in particular are underwhelming, thoughts coming across as unfinished or too vague to really make an impact, save those moments when something clear emerges, generally in harmony – Crooked Carousel, Hollow Abyss (epilogue) – crystallizing the feeling that made the album stir some emotions in the first place.  Compositionally, the album is sound, but paired with the generally fractured words, the two-minute runtime feels similarly fractured; a few tracks peek over the three-minute mark and this lends the listen the weight that its mood implies should elsewhere exists.

Days of Delay is, in this sense, the perfect introduction to the band: a taste test.  It gives you some really amazing moments and strings them together such that the album feels memorable.  By the time you realize you’re hearing more of the concept than the actual content, you’ve had a chance to move on to the next disc, or Agesandages, which take those moments and fleshes them out a bit.