Friday, Jan. 29th 2010

Street Lights For A Ribcage

By LB

So, I’ve had Street Lights For A Ribcage pretty much on repeat for the past ten days. This, as you may know, is the first LP from local robot-rockers Sleepy Eyes of Death, released in 2007. It’s turned out to be one of those records that I bought a while ago and is just now dominating my cognizance. Funny how that works. In short, it’s highly recommended.

In long, it’s a fantastically dense sci-fi record of cyborgian proportions, filled with caustic synthesizers, shimmering vistas and thundering drum crackles. There are scant vocals, and only of the vocoder variety. One gets the sense that this could be the “singer/songwriter” album of a gentle yet erratic T-1000 in a post-human war-torn compuscape. In fact, there’s an alluring (for fans of artificial intelligence, anyway) string of thematic imagery that combines both the organic and the synthetic in bombastically beautiful ways. In the album’s title, in the song titles (i.e. “Tired Channels”, “Capsule-Collapse”, and “Static For Blood”), and even in the arrestingly varied moods found throughout.

“Eyes Spliced Open” has a wonderful change of pace 3 minutes in where the manic drumming and suffocating sheets of laser suddenly cease, as if to recharge, or shake hands with their inevitable demise. I often envision the final scene of “Terminator” during this song, feeling as though I should be in an abandoned steel mill, thick steam pouring out of loose valves, precariously perched on rickety catwalks. This outro is indicative of a pensiveness that pervades SEOD’s modus operandi and shows up in other places, in other forms. This thoughtfulness, melded with such a brisk and futuristic record, should be cause for applause.

Fun Fact: Did you know Sera Cahoone played drums on “Cells Divide”? Man, she just keeps getting cooler and cooler.