An Illusion of Loss is a lengthy exploration of the color gray.
The album consists almost exclusively of slow soft piano, ambient field recordings, an occasional plucked instrument, and reverb strong enough to be considered its own instrument. Like a lengthy academic research monograph, the album spends its 16 tracks and full double LP runtime focused narrowly on an exploration of a particular emotion.
Each track shines a subtly new perspective on this feeling. The opening track, Glimpses, feels gentle and grateful, like an old man watering his plants. There's a touch of grief on track two and a hopeful melancholia on track three. Track four, It's a Business of Sadness, feels nostalgic for the life of another, like a ghost looking in passively on a stranger living a lonely life. The fifth track, Fingertips gives me a more first person emotional impression, like looking back at your own past and feeling it slip away from you.
I could go on, but I think the idea should be clear. The album, on the whole, is quite beautiful. The description provided on Bandcamp at the time of writing suggests that the artist, Funeral, was unsure of their own artistic intention behind this album, and that rings true to me as well, but not in a negative way. It's pensive and searching. It's an exploration of emotion in a very honest way. Sometimes going in with a plan and a concept gets in the way of honest emotional expression. Without that kind of intellectual framework, we instead get a raw glimpse into these feelings.
However, bringing back the comparison to reading a lengthy research monograph, this album is exhausting to listen to carefully. While there is shifting nuance ever present, my mental faculties fatigue and my ability to distinguish subtle shades of gray falters long before the album has concluded. Fortunately, my listening was interrupted, forcing me to finish another day. With a fresh head two days later, I picked up where I left off and found myself once again sensitive to the album's subtle musical sensibilities.
Maybe the album would have been better if it were half as long. Each track is good, this isn't a matter of culling lower quality tracks to focus the spotlight, but simply a matter of pacing and endurance. That said, if you're listening to this album as ambient background music, its length is very possibly a selling point. This album would make for an excellent choice while writing or engaging in some similarly contemplative craft. Well, almost.
Only two tracks significantly break from the pattern. Like Funeral's previous album, Burial Plot, there is a solitary energetic track. The eighth track, Burden, adds in a rhythmic percussion element, vocals, and some glitchy/IDM production. This track is a good palette cleanser. More tracks like this would have served the overall pacing quite well.
The other track that breaks the mold is track 12, Last Yard. This track features an extended spoken word delivery that is uncompromisingly depressing and hopeless. In what sounds like someone truly at wits end, the narrator goes on at length about how they see no value in their life. I have mixed feelings about this track. It's so heavy handed and bleak, I feel like it invalidates this album for the ambient listening I suggested above. To be truthful, I'm at a loss with this one. The track itself is good, it has a musical place and artistic purpose, but its inclusion on this album feels poisonous.
I'm not sure how to conclude this review. The music is beautiful, it really is. An Illusion of Loss is fifteen careful, gentle presentations of nostalgic melancholia with one unresolved, distractingly blunt, nihilistic exception tossed in.
