There is this part of me that is seemingly addicted to negativity that needs the occasional downer now and then. Enter To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie's debut full length, The Patron: ten tracks of weighty electronic music that will end up making you feel lonesome, mournful and rejuvenated.
To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie is Jehna Wilhelm and Mark McGee. With a cast of supporting musicians, they use intriguing, spacey sounds and otherworldly noise to produce heady masses of sound.
And much darker as well. This is not always a cheery release, despite what the swirling pastel packaging makes you think. "The Patron" opens the disc with clouds of cold, screeching noise drones and envelopes you like thick morning fog. As the track progresses, the noise ebbs and flows, perfectly dissolving into the eerie second track, "The Man with the Shovel, is the Man I'm Going to Marry". Starting slowly with ominous dark undertones, it gets more interesting as what sounds like a mournful synthesizer rises above the mix and weeps for eight minutes.
"You Guys Talk, We'll Spill Our Guts" is a standout track, thanks in part to the violin and guitar of Andrew Berg and Jesse Ackerly, respectively. "You Guys Talk, We'll Spill Our Guts" is a bit more structured than the preceding tracks, as decayed violins burst out of the drones like light shining through clouds.
And then there is "With Brass Songs They'll Descend," an overwhelming piece that seems to weigh a thousand tons. Swells of noise make it sound like a wheezing, ghostly machine, and it's as the drones get layered on and your headphones become decidedly overcast with ambient drones that it almost becomes too much to listen to. And just when you think To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie is all doom and gloom, "Very Lovely," a song deserving of its title, comes on with such exuberance. On "Window Shopping," Wilhelm's signature hush-hush vocal style delicately smooths over any anxiety caused by the previous tracks.
It is not fair to call The Patron a downer and tout it as a hefty listen. Calling it such seems to undermine the craft that To Kill A Petty Bourgeoisie is working at here, and emotions aside, this is some amazing electronic music that is also uplifting. Wilhelm and McGee create soundscapes that are huge, deep, cinematic and cerebral. This is the kind of music that demands your complete attention, and is just too good and too overwhelming to serve as mere wallpaper. |