It can’t be a good thing when a CD ends and it takes 10 minutes or so to register that the music has actually stopped.  It’s hard to write this.  Because I really wanted to like this CD very much.  I love the artwork.  I love the idea.  I love the name.  I love everything about it except the music. 

The question I then sought to answer for myself was “Why?”  Why don’t I like the music?  Where did the CD go wrong for me?  What’s my big gripe?

In the most unscientific and moronic terms possible, I can only explain that, “It doesn’t go anywhere.”

Sometimes I wish that I had been able or willing to sit through the music theory class.  I just couldn’t.  I felt angry in that class.  Like how I felt in the art classes where we dissected every great painting I’d ever loved; the art class that made me see every painting now by it’s technical merits.  If however, I had sat through that music theory class, I might be able to explain in not-so-moronic terms what, “It doesn’t GO anywhere” really means.

It’s all I can say though.  There’s nothing about this music that engages my brain enough to pay attention to it.  It doesn’t gently take my hand and lead me along as perhaps I feel it should.  It doesn’t whisper things between the lulls.  It doesn’t leave me feeling like I’ve had a *relation-ship* with it, and even the bleakest KK Null tracks have done that for me.  This just doesn’t.  I listened to the disc several times, and the same thing happens each time.  The music ends and it takes a while before my brain registers, “Oh.  The music stopped.”

I will say that tracks 6 and 8 have moments that are exceptions to my general feeling about this CD.  These two tracks had moments where I felt my brain awake again from “sleep” mode and begin to follow.  Only to be thrown again into an unwilling disenchantment.  I tried so hard to like this.  I hope the musicians involved will not give up.  It seems they are headed some-where, but as for now, this isn’t a disc I’ll spend any more time with.  I’m sorry, fellows. 

Track Listing:
1.)  The World Has Changed
2.)  Explains Colors To The Blind
3.)  Beatitudes
4.)  As The West Encroaches
5.)  Lest We Forget
6.)  Lock 32
7.)  The Crowds Amass
8.)  Summer 1977

On Skean Dhu Recordings
http://www.skeandhu.net

07/13/04