Tangled Thoughts of Leaving
The Alarmist
Bird’s Robe
In discussions of genre, whenever you stick the word “post” in front of something, there is an implication that, whatever that something is, it has been transmuted somehow.
So I’m pretty ok with cutting out the genre-splashing and giving The Alarmist the post rock tag. The elements of rock are well employed but the pointy end is less aimed at your hips and more at your head. Or maybe your third eye.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s a great deal of viscerality in the track. But its blunt force impact is sharpened by a cerebral take in construction. The opening piano is almost twelve tone and there’s no real funk to it. It’s a cold repetitive skeleton on which to build a nightmarish swell of frigid, anxious layering.
Tangled Thoughts don’t deal in lyrics… it makes the music that much more of a text, the title a Rosetta Stone. The Alarmist is like a tarot of climbing anxiety and release which never allows a return to calm. Interpret it to your personal preferences but remember its defining parameters of insistent, rising unease and instability.
There is nothing warm or comforting in this track and in that it is a job frighteningly well done.
MYKI JONEZ
