Below is the "official" review for MfMv1. Any typos, please feel free to fix (though I am hopeful there are none; my in-house editor gave it a going-over), and if any points need clarification, do feel free to ask. Thank you kindly for sharing your album.
(And without further ado, the review...)
Electricity sparks along the tracks and a hiss denotes, “All Aboard.” Within moments the landscape is coursing by at an uncomfortable speed, the ambient darkness obscuring any landmarks that might act as an anchor of perception, but you know you are moving. Quickly. Other vessels hotfoot madly along the grid-flow, noticeable only when crossing your path or shunting up alarmingly closely on either side as they hurtle from station to station. A mechanism rattles out neon plinks, like a tack-hammer smacking irreverently along metallic grooving. A siren warms up in the darkness, rising above the orchestrated cacophony—before rendering the ’scape into limping remnants of what came before. Then a dead Martian intones, “Baby…” This is merely the opening salvo from Music for Misanthropes Volume One—an album title which promises that it, too, is merely the opening salvo from Canadian music collective, Ignore That Door. Over the course of thirteen tracks (none-too-brief tracks at that: be advised this is a double LP, albeit in electronic form), IGT take the listener through the pulsing corridors of Dark Ambient and the flicker-lit tunnels below Dirge Metal, pulsing along past pin-hole glimpses at Bunker Cabaret. The prevailing sense of doom, however, is countermanded with what I can only describe as “pluck”. This term applies not only to the sonic texture that crops up like a spike-worm jauntily smashing its head above the kicked-gravel surface: the minor keys, ominous scales, and the gargoyle vocals orbiting the listener, skipping back and fro between the audio channels. But these worms are ever-present, slinking to and forth as ever-shifting daubs of light (or at least, daubs of “less dark”), balancing the sonic canvas. This lends the experience a more unsettling edge, as you are never allowed to merely succumb to the abyss—but rather kept in a state of perpetual teetering. Ignore That Door took a known risk when requesting that I review this album for them: I am not a musician, and they knew that. I review stories in cinema form. This handicap weighed on me until I first lay down to experience it, lights off and headphones on. In this way, I have listened to Music for Misanthropes Volume One three times, each time all in one go. Over the course of eighty-two consecutive minutes, I flitted along the vaporous razor of consciousness, succumbing to the eldritch chanting embedded amidst the sparking-plunking-zapping-plinking peculiarity as it ratcheted my wakeful mind into dark visions and my sleeping mind into unrecalled flights along the cusp of awareness. Music for Misanthropes Volume One promises that its creators’ funereal capering is merely beginning. Here’s hoping so.
