A Winged Victory For the Sullen S/T. There is...err there was a five ton asteroid hurtling towards the Earth. Perhaps it has already finished hurtling. Update: It has. This may well be the very last record I hear before I am obliterated by space rocks. Update: It isn't. I would not have minded. This album is a dream. Song titles are unimportant. The first song title is languid and lovely. It is Dustin O'Halloran and some other guy. The "some other guy" seems to be appropriating all of the attention in online mentions of this album. I haven't any idea who he is. He's in a Kranky band which makes me think he makes dreary, overly long music when he isn't making A Winged Victory for the Sullen records. Remember the second Jessamine album? That was brilliant. It had complicated packaging. First track is drones and keys. I am assuming the other guy handles the drones and Dustin the piano? The piano is rudimentary. The drones are exquisite. Is the piano rudimentary really? I can not be certain. I am on this kick that every thing these days is mediocrity defined and so I have perhaps unintentionally disparaged Dustin's own virtuosity. Mediocrity on parade is what is causing the general malaise in our universe I believe. From politicians to artists to just the drivers of every day life, your parents, your bus driver, your ice cream vendor. Does anyone really appear to be trying for perfection? Most people achieve very little, even in measure of their tiny ambitions. Track two, again song title is unimportant but it is Requiem for the Static King Part 1. Strings and drones begin, heavenly. It sounds as if it was recorded in the corner of a very large room bereft of everything but the small group of musicians. I always lament my inability to judge the inherent worth of a piece of classical music based solely on an objective criteria of ability and quality of composition. But then is classical really so different from any other from of music and is it not all subjective interpretation. Possibly. I listen to the rocket scientists that are now occupying Denver and their world is one filled only with subjective pronouncements. They are unaware of any inviolable physical law which may govern the universe as a whole but fully cognizant of the miasma of emotional treatises disguised as academic arguments. A living wage? Oh, track three has begin, this is Part 2. But anyway. An emotional treatise composed entirely of music is difficult to describe for someone so inarticulate as myself. I could scan through obscure texts and lift ornate, flowery passages colored purple and impress people that same as Stereolab can do with their pillaging of record collections superior to yours. Bu my life as a student was not soundtracks by the sruminations of genius. I was ruled by Morrissey and Ian Brown and Slowdive. I was only able to attend classes part-time but I went every semester and I graduated without any student debt even wiping out a year of graduate school debt thanks to being part of a team that developed a fairly lucrative algorithm for Raytheon. But anyway. We must end Capitalism, mustn't we, we shall end the most amazing two centuries of progress for the human race, shan't we. We can listen to these beautiful records on our Ipods for the next 1000 years because when the government runs everything innovation is halted. Look at the most highly regulated industries in America, rail(innovation does not exist), air travel(innovation does not exist), finance(innovation is forced into dark recesses where risk is unnecessarily raised because the prospect of return in an over regulated market is minimal), etc, etc, etc... Is Morrissey occupying London or some town in Italy? Probably hoping for a government mandate against vivisection and the introduction of a vegetarian commando force to thin the population of carnivores. What has this to do with music? Nothing at all. But this is an astonishingly pretty album. Song five, the pre-release teaser. I know it was so overplayed here on commercial radio that it feels like an old friend now. Not actually. I have been dating people recently and am beginning to wonder if I am meant to be anti-social and a shut-in after all. I don't much feel a connection with any other human beings. I have a friend at work, a married friend, who I suddenly appreciate because she seems to have shared sensibilities with mine but then I have only ever seen her at work. I am confident, dominant and dynamic at work and at home I curl up in a corner of my basement pressed against an outside wall and read very long books and fall asleep with thoughts of the contradiction of the main tenets of buddhism in my head and heart. If there is no soul then how is one reincarnated? And why must men corrupt everything pure. This music feels pure, a salient distillation of perfection, minimal, spare, intense. Why can't all human emotion be channeled as efficiently and with such a staggering level of warmth and joy. These are my subjective truths. This is my emotional outburst. Dustin O'Halloran deserves as much credit as "some other guy", every records that he makes is gorgeous and the records that other people make where they seem to be offering tribute are also gorgeous--see Lanterns on the Lake. The longest track on the album now. The centerpiece, 12 minutes long, minor keys, drones, slow motion ambience, just amazing. I would walk about my neighbourhood this evening listening to the album whilst dodging raindrops but it never does rain here and there is the incessant intrusion of train whistles that are visited upon us nearly every evening. Will occupy Wall Street shut down commerce sufficiently to stop the trains from interrupting my sleep? And when I ride my bicycle to work I have this overwrought terror of the train tumbling from the tracks on top of me and my specialized bicycle as I race underneath the railroad bridge as the train passes overhead. And there are the skunks. This song is mainly empty spaces. What skill in recording to prevent this from being meaningless nothingness. There are slight crescendoes that weave slowly into and out of the mix, there is a ebb and flow of tender emotion. It does feel like a paean to loss, a soundtrack to decline. A nostalgic view of the once believed moment of permanence when everything was fine and nobody hurt. The mythical age that has never existed, ever. The title of this one is The Symphony Pathetique and it is let down a bit by the title, it sounds as if it could be ironically applied. Irony is so overdone. Give me the dreadful earnestness of someone like Chris Martin, however uninformed, over the knowing nihilism of Stephen Malkmus who seems genuinely terrified of expressing an earnest belief in anything. We have moved into the second half of he symphony, a slow draw down of forces until it is merely drones and their echoes filling the mix. A symphony for the autumn brilliance. Even in Colorado where trees are treated so rudely by the elements there is color enough to harken the spirit and allow one to turn a blind eye to the foolishness of our generation bathed in ignorance. I am eating chocolate and considering the gentleness of this album as a balm to counteract the disappointment I feel entitled to own. Slowly the symphony is reawakening and drones are cascading, drone upon drone, half filled with the minor particles of the standard model. I lied. It did rain here. It rained last Saturday and I was meant to be at work but I stayed home because of the rain. It has not rained since. It will likely not rain again until April. But if it does rain our hearts will be prepared, our souls strengthened and Dustin O'Halloran prince of stainless song craft will be there to capture our sudden elation. It will be drawn out, it will be slowed, it will be compressed into a fine distillate from a cacophonous colloid and it will rise to the occasion and save us from the mediocrity that has been so brutally cast among us threatening the existence of our entire civilization. When A Winged Victory for the Sullen is, by government mandate, proclaimed the only music worthy of public consumption then we will all gather in dells and city squares and in tiny hovels and we will look to the heavens and feel untethered by the paucity of our physical existence and truly experience timelessness as it should be visited upon everyone at least once in their life. And we will eat chocolate and Kate Bush will be there.