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Edward Ka-Spel, "Dream Logik Part Two"
Ka-Spel's follow up to last year's excellent Part One is similarly organized, but features vastly different results. More disjointed and even jarring at times, this album mines new emotional territory. Uncertainty and dread give rise to paranoiac self-effacement on this melancholic gaze into the underworld.
Themes of flight from things both geographic and psychic occur throughout Dream Logik Part Two, starting with the lyrics about running and fleeing on "As a Bird/A Missing Piece." The use of screeching tires, horns honking, and passing trains on "Going My Way?" and Ka-Spel's line, "Don't talk about me when I'm gone" from "My Wandering Star/As a Bird (Part 2)" add to this theme. There's even a sense of Kafka-esque escape throughout the first-person narration of "The Modest Ambitions of Cedric the Centipede." On "Darkness O" he hints that this desire to flee comes in part from a fear of the future when he says, "Nothing can be forecast/nothing is clear except the water we tread/and our endless capacity for fear of what comes next." He also hints at a sense of disillusionment with himself when he says, "I am the accident waiting to happen" on "Going My Way?"
Yet, not everything on Part Two is so bleak. "As a Bird/A Missing Piece" opens with the sound of deep-sleep breathing that's interrupted by whimsical jazz and a tapping at the window, perhaps by one of the many Alices who appear lost in the reflecting corridors of Ka-Spel's own dream wonderland. The album's centerpiece, "Cedric the Centipede," uses simple, playful synth melodies to illustrate the story. Later, this mood is reinforced with the repetition of a child-like chorus. Things end on a gentle note with the aquatic sounds, light chants, and bird-like electronic chirps of "My Wandering Star/As a Bird (Part 2)."
The lack of anything so bold as "Harvester" from Part One and an increased reliance on collage techniques makes Part Two a somewhat lackadaisical affair, and this patient pacing combined with such dark lyrics give it an intensity that's more emotional than musical. Even so, Ka-Spel's nightmarish visions make it a successfully fascinating and, at times, chilling successor.
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