It's Immaterial - Life's Hard And Then You Die


$23 Adventure Time, Part 1/4

To paraphrase the poetress of our modern age, we are living in a material world, and i'm an immaterial girl. 

Life's Hard and Then You Die is the first album by It's Immaterial. 

But who's it by?

It's immaterial.

No seriously, tell me who made it.

The band's name is It's Immaterial.

Oh, ok, thank you for grammatically clarifying that for me.

You're welcome.

These gentlemen are from Liverpool, and the back of the jacket has a photo of a man spraying a flammable liquid from his mouth onto a flaming torch in front of another man with a bucket on his head. I don't care what it turns out to be, i can't not buy it and listen to it.

Get in your car? You betcha! 30 miles or more seems kind of arbitrary, but i'm in for the long haul and i don't mind ridiculous. It's suspiciously Talking Heads-ish, but it's only the first track. Perhaps a bit of an ellipsis is in order...

... song about quitting being a tupperware salesman ... there's some Pet Shop Boys things going on ha! "Turn off the tv" that's a nice coincidence ... well, side a is just lovely. You could certainly hear them like a Talking Heads meets Pet Shop Boys ripoff, both musically and thematically, but they have their own personality for sure. It's wildly eclectic in terms of instrumentation, but there's a tangibly mundane quality too. It's about how truly weird and oddly unfulfilling "normal" actually is. On to side b.

Hello, new wave take on mariachi. I think what impresses me most is how natural this all feels. It's objectively bizarre, but it feels completely logical and coherent. I think it's the production, because all these radically different instruments from one track to another aren't jarring at all. Oh, Dave Bascombe. Yeah, he did all the big British stuff in the 80s, Tears for Fears, Depeche Mode, even modern stuff like Goldfrapp and Lady Antebellum. I wouldn't have been able to tell you this sounds like him, but as soon as i read he was the producer i could definitely hear it. He does have a very distinct approach to the audio spectrum and how vocals sit in the mix. Think of how Everybody Wants to Rule the World sounds, then imagine any other song sounding like that.

Well, this was just delicious. I can't really describe it better than i already did, but it's well worth a listen or 12. Weird, but tangible. Here's what life is like, i'm not sure how i'm supposed to feel about it. No explanations, no hyperbole, no ideology to speak of, it's quite a strange experience to be honest. I really enjoyed it, go give it a try for yourself.

Addendum: sweet! My copy even has the Driving Away From Home bumper sticker still inside.

Part 2

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