Wasatch Front - One Hundred And Thirteen Thousand Eight Hundred And Eighty

Released: January 23

One Hundred And Thirteen Thousand Eight Hundred And Eighty is quite a title to begin with, especially considering the cryptic context we are given before starting the album. But the album is, ostensibly, a story about loss. The title itself alludes to a specified period of time, meant to denote how long something lasted which, in this case, is in hours of happiness for the author. And the sonics of the album match up to this rather sadly reflective title, consisting of mainly sparse and washed out pads combined with muffled recordings of voices or other found noises. There’s a persistent feeling of emptiness that spans the whole runtime, like everything just has this particularly hollow and cold aesthetic to it, which plays well into the themes. 

The voices are quite persistent throughout as well, usually coming across as conversations between two people or just the random sounds of a TV on in the background. “They know everything” sort of makes us of both, with the conversation coming in about halfway through the track and being accompanied by very washed out synth playing a sad or even almost mournful and simple harmonization. The final track on the four track EP makes little if any use of the voice recording we hear everywhere else, but comes to a particularly noisy moment about halfway through with cacophonous slamming carrying on for a few seconds until the vinyl dust-soaking half-broken melodies return in ghostly fashion. 

The washed out and empty aesthetic of the album is what holds it together. It produces such a notably forlorn or even despondent quality that takes the abstract soundscapes and contextualizes them into the story. It is an unclear story, we don’t know what exactly happened here, but that’s not the point. The universality of those feelings is enough to give us a beautiful picture, even if it is rather blurred and surreal.