Things I find in the annals of my hard drive. A fake music review about a fake band. lolz worthy.
****
Spelunking in Hades draws inspiration from a muse-less wasteland
Spelunking in Hades delivers another hellicious album of ceaseless techno, with enough flourishes to rival the flamboyance of Erasure in his most Village-People-proud moments. The Sirens Boarded my Ship…That’s What She Said proves to be as immature and convoluted as its title. Perhaps the San Francisco based quintet could have created a better musical product if it had been muses and not sirens that had boarded their ship. Sloshy drums and Nintendo bleeps and blips back up the narration of the Homeric adventures of young homosexual Uliss Sees—a bastardization of the name and warrior status of Ulysses paralleling the bastardization of the Odyssey subplots that provide the stretched basis for the lyrical content.
Heavy on the lyrics for a techno album, each song molds an interconnected piece for the overall depiction of Uliss Sees, a gay man beckoned on a strange journey by a mysterious yet gentle oracle. Songs bearing titles like “Unchained Circe” fail to fill the Olympic sized shoes shaped by their anticipatory titles, as the vague journey that Uliss Sees embarks upon appears more like an endless night at a rainbow speckled San Francisco club than anything with a realizable destination. Whether this is a symptom of the techno element or the hypothetical goal of Spelunking in Hades to only appeal to a tiny demographic of gay men, one may not be quite sure.
Glow-faded echoes of synthesizers meet the crooning restless tenor voice of Matt Harlan as he elicits accessible melodies, creating cavernous depth to the overall sound. But trying to find meaning in the volume of tones is somewhat like dropping a penny in a well to determine the length of the abyss—you can hear that dull plunk at the bottom, but it doesn’t mean you will have any more insight into the measure of the fall. And that is exactly the feeling that one gets as the last seconds of sound from the album wave into nothingness. Uliss Sees neither fails nor succeeds in his trek, but rather embodies the listlessness of a peripatetic “Troubadour.” If his journey reaches its completion in a techno album marred with meaninglessness, yet still dance-able, then perhaps Uliss Sees has succeeded.
