This album comes to us on the artist’s own label called Simple Box Construction, but the elaborately constructed wood box that contains this album is anything but simple. All 150 copies of this album are hand assembled, fabricated, stamped and printed, and the disc comes with a photo book called “A Prelude To The New World” which is meant as a companion piece to the album, not as liner notes. The photos are all black and white images of power lines, highways, factories, trees, abandoned buildings, airplanes, rivers and birds. A see-through vellum slip cases the entire package, requiring some effort to open the packaging to listen to the disc.
Musically, it’s feedback-heavy electric guitar drone. The lengthy, poetic song titles might suggest certain post-rock bands, but the songs don’t progress and crescendo the way those bands tend to do. Instead, they explore a certain mood, and experiment with layering feedback noise or melodic guitar riffs. The fourth track has a hint of bluesy slide guitar, while the fifth approaches noisy blackened metal riffing. The album-closing title track features a spoken poem by Matt Finney, about America and hopelessness. So this is indeed cinematic death music, in sound and presentation. It’s intense and dramatic, but on a personal level, without a big Hollywood budget. But it works as a fascinating account of one person’s grey, blurry, smog-filled view of the world.
