I'm never quite sure if Americans appreciate the impact that their country has on the rest of the world, in terms of their industry, culture, and politics. U.S. Nadir is a protest album about America, but I was not surprised to find that the artist, Bit Cloudy, hails from London. I'm on the South coast of the UK and am all too familiar with how the United States defines the conversation, and the feeling that the American elite seem hell bent on bringing about the apocalypse.
This is an instrumental album, and so many of the specific themes are defined via the album's titles, such as opening track I Pledge Allegiance To Four Ecstatic Horsemen and the fantastically titled Discourse Inferno, but musically I think the message is still fairly clear.
The aforementioned opener sounds euphoric at first, with beautiful ambient choirs and glockenspiels, before descending to dissonant modulation, big squelching synths, and aggressive trip hop rhythms. The following track, Muppet Eagle, wastes no time. It's immediately loud and brash and angry, and stylistically has more than a whiff of Aphex Twin (sounding like something from his Analord series, or that one bit in Windowlicker). It's sick, I love it.
I'll say right now there's not a dud here. Every track here stands on its own two feet, sounding like it belongs without sounding like a reiteration of something that came before. Bad Bad Faith, Bad Bad Actors opens with skittering hand claps that someone writing a essay for school might describe as symbolising said bad actors patting each other on the back, who knows, maybe that's what's going on? Anyway, its met with choirs, spiky keys, and big big drums, and it ends up sounding simultaneously doomy and cathartic.
Another cathartic one is Trans Kid Karmic Vengeance, perhaps the only remotely optimistic title of the bunch. Here, dark scary ambience builds and builds and builds louder than anything we've heard so far and becomes brighter and brighter and feels completely otherworldly.
It's a fairly sad album, overall. None less so than the closing track (Indulge and Reward) The Annihilation of Kindness, which sums up the core problem being addressed by the album. It feels like there's no consequence for acting badly with these people. You bully and you vilify and you troll and you become the President of the United States of America. You become the world's first trillionaire. You cement your place as a defining voice in the culture. These people don't give a shit about the damage they cause. Hell, they get a kick out of it.
This album is the product of frustration that I think millions if not billions of people in the world feel, and a powerful one at that. I don't know what the future holds, I'm sure bad people will continue to gain power for as long as I breathe and beyond, but at least we have art to help us not feel so alone and so helpless in that time.