With a name dually inspired by Francois Truffaut's The 400 Blows and a sudden, tragic drop in seratonin levels, 400 Lonely Things is clouded in a nebulous haze of sadness, brought on by doubt, aggravated by melancholy. The beautifully packaged limited edition LP of the debut album offers no information on the instrumentation or personnel involved in its creation. The idea, I suppose, is to isolate the listener in the same way the artist imagines himself isolated.
The cover artwork shows a badly drawn, dejected cartoon dog sloppily torn from a newspaper, sitting in the middle of a giant lacquered wood plaque. I can't think of a sadder image, really. The 18 brief songs on the LP feel as if they were all conceived and created in solitude, like a slightly less neurotic, slightly more talented Jandek. Most of the tracks are built around lonely minor-chord guitar, or haunted loops, distorted and mutated for maximum spiritual emptiness. 400 Lonely Things use a gallery of effects pedals and keyboards to add the desolate atmosphere redolent of driving slowly along empty roads at twilight, in the middle of nowhere. Many of the tracks have a washed-out, faded nostalgia, like the somber loop that comprises "Tagiri." It's a bit like Boards of Canada, and a bit like early Edward Ka-Spel solo works, but really it's like nothing other than itself. There is a certain hypnotic coherence to the sequence of songs, although each track is a molehill unto itself, a lonely piece formulated to pull you deeper into a reflective sense of regret. "Stuff Found In My Wings" adds gentle organic clicks to a barely-there roomtone. At times, this frustration becomes positively hallucinogenic, as in the disturbed sound collage of "Out Of Phase" and the swirling, ritualistic drones of "Catching Falling Stars." The seventeenth track is composed of 400 very lonely seconds of silence, which segue into a locked-groove impasse, obscuring the final track "Very Lonesome," a Moondog-meets-Daniel Johnston campfire sing-along that slowly slides backwards into a pit of haunted echoes. 400 Lonely Things is a quietly impressive debut, and the perfect antidote to all those fucking happy pills everyone is on.
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