Portrait of an Artist in Repose
For an avowed fan of progressive rock, Tony K favors music based on intuitive explorations rather than planned structure, the hallmark of that genre. Starting with a stutter, "First Son" drops us into a high-ceilinged field of disjointed rhythms marking time beneath confident guitar strokes that explore all manner of keys. "Duty" quickly dispels the hazy dream of the first track with its industrial hammerstrokes, thick and heavy as tar, panned to bounce back and forth across one's skull like a rubber brick. Other chords (keyboards?) soon join the morass, working it into a boiling, otherworldly frenzy.
Then, "Generations" constructs an amazing drone, bursting with overtones in harmonic layers that take turns ebbing to the forefront, then receding again. I believe there are some keyboards somewhere in there, perhaps some guitar or bass, or perhaps a team of Yeti working a 20-foot bow across a thatch of resonating bamboo; it's quite a sound. At the end the bottom drops out and only the high tones are left, in a beautiful denouement. Probably my favorite track on this record.
Further on, more far-flung territory is covered; in the muted but gutsy "Search", I hear a deep-sea team calculating impossible depths from the dissipated returns of their sonar echoes. "Mud" and "Second Generation" (the latter featuring perhaps the most psychotic marimba I've ever heard) seem to be the most improvisational, and the most non-tonal, showing a taste for harmonic complexity to match the textural complexity that appears to be Mr. K's birthright.
The closing, thickly oblique "Repose" suggests a trip inside the cerebellum, neural passageways emitting sparks on their lightning-quick journey through gray matter. It's weighty, with its beyond-processed guitar and synth whorls, but adventuresome, like the rest of these nine tracks, and provides a fitting though hardly complacent endpoint.
I do have a small quibble in that there are occasional clicks (pedals going on and off, perhaps) and other little noises that don't belong among these impossibly lush sounds. But these are only distractions when listening on headphones at high volume, a nice way to listen to this but not necessarily the environment everyone is going to have. A few tracks also are a bit hissier than the others (seem to be the guitar tracks like "Mud" and "First Son"), which is only really noticeable at the beginnings and ends, gating or simply trimming them off in mastering would make it a non-issue.
These are but minor technical notes, though. This is a deep record that has a story to tell, albeit oblique and veiled, and from the song titles it seems to be a serious, dramatic tale, of lineage and growth. Rewards close listening.
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