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Failing Lights
While this solo project from Wolf Eyes member Mike Connelly has been active for over five years, most of the output has been limited to small run tapes and CDRs that only those "in the know" had a chance to get. Here's a chance for the average person to check out Connelly’s distinct, creepy take on bleak dark ambience without having to outbid Henry Rollins on eBay.
Throughout this album there are some similarities to Wolf Eyes, which isn't unexpected considering Connelly is currently one third of that project, but the similarities are subtle, and the sound goes off in its own direction entirely.Whenever Wolf Eyes goes for a dark or frightening mood, I've always felt there was a lingering sense of fun still there.Sure, they can create wonderfully disturbing soundscapes, but it’s like a 1980s slasher film:there's a tongue-in-cheek sense that they’re still having fun.This material, however, is more like The Exorcist to their Friday the 13th:it's much more about mood and subtlety, and while not as apt to go for outright terror, it’s stronger in its ability to just lurk off in the distance menacingly, creating a beautiful sense of tension.
The nauseous string plucks of "Serve in Silence" reverberate around a claustrophobic ambience, and with the rough, lo-fi recording conditions, sounds like it could be culled from a 40 year old audio tape found in a creepy abandoned house far off in the woods."Revealing Scene" puts squelchy electronics in a swamp-like ambience, with flatulent noise bursts flailing around in the muck just out of sight before everything is obscured in a drenching torrent of static rain.
The menace becomes more tangible as microphone scrapes and muffled, overdriven noises swell to the surface in "Telling Artifacts," but the harsher stuff stays just far enough away to create tension more so than pure terror, which is the strength of this album.There's a distant, fragmented quality to the sound that become more pronounced, alternating noise with open, uncomfortable near silence.The sparse outro feels like pure foreshadowing of something bad about to happen.
Closer "The Comfort Zone" is anything but, allowing some of the darkness that was hinted at prior to become the focus.It begins much like the others, organic swells of sound and echoing, guitar notes that are just a bit "off" in an intangible way.White noise mimics breathing in the distance with shrieks of feedback and low end notes before finally opening up into pure chaos.Most of the tracks 18 minute duration ends up being a sustained decrepit church organ that appears with a ferocity that never really relents, even as the sound slowly decays away by the end of the track, leaving just an uncomfortable ambience to end the album.
The greatest strength of this disc is how it showcases Mike Connelly's ability to craft slow building, menacing audio dramas that are not really apt to terrorize, but instead lead to a subtle, disquieting tension that is compelling from beginning to end.Hopefully this will be the first of more wider-scale releases that’ll make hearing more of his solo output a bit less difficult.
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