If you’re the type of person who might reflexively pick up an album promising an instrumental fusion of jazz and metal, I can only assume you’ve already purchased this album and are only reading this review for comparative curiosity. Therefore, I’ll direct this to people who, like me, hold a reflexive skepticism for a project like this on its face. To them, the core of my advice is this: shake off the shackles of hesitancy and open your heart to being taken on a very specific and novel journey.
This album opens strong with “The Joy Refinery”, a song which boldly asserts that you’ve entered into a new place outside of your comfort zone. A massive injection of the sci-fi fantasy sensibilities that gave us Underworld, The Matrix, Blade Runner, and Resident Evil (the Milla Jovovitch vehicle, not the video games). By the end of this song, I was thoroughly intrigued, certainly enough to commit to this review.
So what occupies this ambiguously dystopian world that I’m personally referring to as “Nightmare Capitalist Space Louisiana”? “Insolvent Sea” and “Undergrowth” feel like they seek to populate this space which characters and introduce the beginning of a story full of action and burdened with the kind of fear that sets the frantic heart of the lemming to beat under the ever-present looming of the owl’s silent shadow. It feels like seeing a team assemble under dire straights, particularly as it moves into the playful drums and contemplative horns that add depth to the mystical atmosphere of “Fallen Angel Stew.”
The film goes on, and I won’t subject you to a play-by-play because I think this journey is best taken for yourself. Let your imagination wander and fill the rusted alleyways of whatever dank future city this album transports you to (Maybe you’ll meet me in Nightmare Capitalist Space Louisiana, maybe you’re at the other end of the galaxy in Steampunk Pirate Florida!), and revel in the vibrant motion of this album all the way to its mournful epilogue that suggests the work is never done. Trust that this artist has a masterful grasp of composition, timing, and mood. If you let them drive, you’ll find yourself 45min later twitching with the same instinct that convinced you as a child that, upon leaving a theater, you were imbued with a temporary mastery of Kung Fu absorbed directly from Jet Li or Keanu Reeves.
