Making our way back to shore, we check into a lowly watering hole to soak ourselves in booze, washing away the pain from The Inside Room...
#3
40 Watt Sun - The Inside Room
I haven’t felt this way in such a long time about a record – an unsated, mournful feeling that bubbles up from some hitherto undiscovered fissure in the depths of my heart. Probing further, one can discover the frail, weak pulse that occupies “the inside room.” Its bleak doom metal in the absolute sense of the term; there’s only melancholy and monochrome to be heard and felt on this record although it’s so heart-rending it’s almost impossible to feel moved by it. Patrick Walker’s (ex-Warning) passionate, despondent and soul-rattling voice strides effortlessly over the minimalistic yet ocean-sized riffs, each player in lock-step with one another, communicating an avalanching, existential malaise that seems to stand in solidarity with anyone who has shed a tear in anguish or has lost something so precious to them. To feel so utterly lost in and arrested by a piece of music without once suspending one’s disbelief – not even for a second - is rare; The Inside Room is one of those once in a decade records. Perhaps these inhumanly talented upstarts 40 Watt Sun are one of those once in a decade bands, too. What’s more incredible is the thought of it having been recorded over three tireless days and nights – a mere seventy two hours! Hauntingly beautiful, like a living reminder that we are somehow incomplete and for that, we must despair.
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The Top 10 of 2011
