ROUND MIDNIGHT

I love this album though some may find it depressing. It is an album of contradiction, so alienating and sad, yet so beautiful and complete. It's not an uplifting album to listen to and yet quite good it is. Actually only the subjects are unpleasant, the music is pure beauty. With the subjects covered it could have been the soundtrack to the film "Lost in Translation."

"Round Midnight" is a modern sounding work about the human condition: dreams lost, loneliness, the lie of materialism, and the emptiness of the society our world has become. It asks and it ponders how we've ended up as such strangers, in such collective misery, in societies that get bigger and more crowded every year. We just had a great thread in the forum about depression which seems to get more prevalent all the time. Why is that happening? The themes of this album may offer some insight why. Essentially it covers similar conceptual ground of "Fear of a Blank Planet" except that this album is about the adult blank planet. This world you and I trudge out into every day for the privilege of affording food, as we create real wealth for more important people. We know what we're doing isn't fulfilling and yet if we don't do it we end up sleeping on cardboard in the street. How evolved, indeed.

The lyrics which are pure poetry, along with the booklet photography and the stunning album cover garner an A+ in presentation as they perfectly convey the message and compliment the music. The back cover features a photo of a plant growing from a nutrient compound in a sterile glass jar. A perfect metaphor for so many things in our lives, from our jobs to our consumerism to our souls: trying to find meaning and live in a world more suffocating by the year.

The music is alternative prog rock that is somewhere in that solo-Gabriel (circa "UP") and Radiohead neighborhood although Moongarden is slightly more accessible. You will find pulsing rock music that is brooding and slow generally, with occasional electronica or metal one moment, acoustic or piano dressed song the next. Always present is a thumping bass, emotionally heavy mellotron or keys, and insanely good rock drumming. And then there are the vocals which are quite Gabriel-like and filled with emotion, anger, and occasional release. When I think about this music I envision a lava lamp with black lava and white light, bubbling away in an empty dark apartment and the glow it casts on the floor around it. And the person who had to get out of that apartment but really had no where better to go.

If you love sad music you really have to get this one. Also recommended to fans of classy modern prog rock and people who wonder if our world is falling apart. The back of the booklet features a puppet on strings, with the words "everything is fading away" below the picture. This is an album you don't really want to hear but one that you should anyway. For this music is screaming to you where this world controlled by global corporate power has led us and continues to lead us. Yet another plea from an artist for us to wake the hell up.

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