TOP X ALBUMS OF MMIX: I

I. Sol Eye Sea i (by) Irepress
Progressive/ Psychedelic / Metal / Hardcore / Electronica

Without even getting into the first impression left by the purpley madness on the cover, it's hard to know what to expect going into Sol Eye Sea i.  And after listening, it's hard not to become defensive when spreading the good word — successfully describing to anyone else what you heard is going to be as easy as convincing them you just saw Sasquatch.  Any album as chimerical as Sol Eye Sea, by all logic, should be a mess — and maybe it is a little messy, but damn does it work.

When bands attempt to mix divergent styles together, it can usually go one of several ways.  There are "generic style + additional instrument" bands (folk metal, chamber pop), or bands which write individually unique songs, almost like they're composing a mixtape (Gorillaz, etc.). The danger is always that nothing syncs on a compositional level, and Irepress wisely fuses their influences into a cohesive sound that permeates everything from their selection of tones to the background guitar filler. At various moments on Sol Eye Sea, you'll find these guys re-imagining and re-appropriating prog-rock, post-hardcore, trip-hop, electronica, post-rock and something I'm going to call "Eastern math-sludge metal", sprinkled with handclaps, group-chant vocals, howled screams and nonsensical phonetics, haunting strings, piano, glitch, and a guitar that sounds like a bagpipe.  Oh yes — and soundclips from The Goonies remixed breakbeat style.

I'll try to explain why all this works so well, but I want to note that obviously many people aren't going to agree with me. By virtue of its uniqueness, some listeners will find Sol Eye Sea strange and indigestible.  But to suggest that this is quantity over quality, or some such glib dismissal, would be a gross misunderstanding of what Irepress is doing. The album works because the many style-shifts and quirks aren't simply staggered one after the other; this is a band whose every chord progression and interlude is rich with identity. Even so, style can only get an artist so far. Many critically acclaimed experimental acts — particularly those that incorporate electronic elements — leave me feeling cold emotionally, distant from the music and bored. Take indie-darlings Battles, a band that treads superficially kind-of similar territory as Irepress.  The members of Battles certainly possess musical chops, throwing together so many disparate technical tricks that every hip music blog seems to adore them. But the end result strikes me as only superficially "interesting" music. It's the same problem that a lot of prog-[whatever] faces: each element is there just to be there, and taken apart, each is boring on its own, innovative only so far as its proximity to all those other cute little tricks and odd time signatures. No element of the music is unique to the band; nothing defines their sound. 

Irepress, on the other hand, could never be mistaken for anything else but Irepress, and anyway, they're far too earnest to be hip and too fun to be pretentious. They understand that they need to take their time with their creativity, to pace themselves, and it's a large part of the album's success. There's certainly a lot going on, but importantly, never too much at once.  The tones and effects successfully navigate the fine line between "unique" and "tacky" — whereas the latter would amount to no more than sounds chosen for their strangeness, everything here relates to everything else, making each unexpected turn a textured revelation of tone instead of just a quirky "hey, let's add a theremin!" moment.  In other words, the music is coherent enough to work instead of gimmicky enough to distract you from the fact that it doesn't.

There is space on Sol Eye Sea, and a lot of it — even the first listen gives an impression of an experience. Instead of rushing at you headfirst and pummeling you into attention, Irepress makes music that moves with the flow of some half-crazed mosh-pit breakdown — picture those heavy, deliberate steps, swaying arms, the unpredictable energy, the sudden surge of momentum, the boot that comes out of nowhere and knocks you on your ass. When you look back up, no one seems to be moving very fast, they're just doing their little dance, but things could turn raucous at any moment.  If I really had to get specific, describing Sol Eye Sea?  It's like getting into a Drunken Master style mosh-pit throwdown with Buckethead at a Buddhist-themed discotheque... in space.  You know how there are bands where you can listen to a split-second splash of sound and immediately say "Oh, that's David Gilmour, innit."  Irepress is like that. Dancing mixed with metal? Breakdowns composed as segments of a movement instead of gimmicky transitions? Progressive music that's so fun and engaging you feel like you're on drugs, instead of just assuming the musicians were? They pull it off. This is truly 2009's classic, at least within my collection — and since Irepress aren't likely to spawn many imitators, they will likely remain one of the most original and inventive bands in music today.