Click on a link to hear a sample of the track.

01. Dressed in black
02. For the love of God
03. Christmas
04. Blinded by blood
05. It is not sound
06. The truth
07. In the red
08. Your call
09. Operator


Review in Progressive World July 2005

Evaluation:

What is it?

Stark. Bleak. Stringent. Moribund. And that's just the artwork.

Analysis:

What it is:

This is the soundtrack to someone's psychosis or everyone's apocalypse. Equal parts ambient, trip-hop, movie score (I use the word "score" colloquially … there is nothing composed here as much as constructed), "Blood Inside" is narcolepsy-inducing, yet at the same time an emollient; an aberration yet strangely familiar.

There is no real instrumental prowess on display, precious little conventional harmonic progression (save perhaps the synthesized Bach excerpt on the tag of "It Is Not Sound"), and nary a foray into conventional structure. Only the "Tomorrow Never Knows" quality of disc-closer "Operator" resembles a "song."

The transmogrified vocals float eerily across the surface of each piece and intensify the desire for somnambulism. The samples and loops utilized are unobtrusive yet omnipresent, bringing respite to the listener just as one's acuity starts to atrophy…

Blood Inside washes over the listener, eliminating the strains of all music from the subconscious, not so much cleansing as purging one's musical palette. As the last notes fade away though, I realized that in the absence of music, the unspeakably ubiquitous void created by this disc left me craving … what, I don't know … I felt drained. Then I played the disc again. And again…

Summary:

I imagine that this is the impression that Brian Wilson's inner circle must have gotten when he played Smile for the first time…

Rating: 9-/10 [4.5/5] (the minus is for obfuscating the concept … I want to know why someone would create this)

By Jan-Mikael Erakare