Chris Irregardless - Honey Comb Logic

 Released: April 29

The latest album from Florida-based Chris Irregardless is a strange adventure meant convey a story from the end of the world, starting out in nature and ending up in firmly space-bound abstract territory. The opening track, “The Last Nature Sound You Will Ever Hear,” sets the tone with strange and glitchy guitar loop that start out strange and slowly degrades from there. As birds chirp in the ambience of nature, the guitar loop grinds to a halt slowly, eventually becoming just twisted relish thes  background noise while the surrounding nature sounds slowly do the same.

As the album continues, things continue to get weird. For much of this album, Chris shows a particular affinity for these broken and disconnected loops that were shown in the first track. “The Bus Takes The Sky” and “An Apple Away” lean into this motif, with sparse and minimal percussion punctuating the spaces in between the loop pausing and restarting. Both have this very lopsided feeling as the percussion more of less continues but the loops they support run, stop, start, and restart at seemingly erratic intervals. There are a few tracks that forego this, like “Slow Orbit’ which feels like something much closer to a spacey ambient track with all the smooth edges, though there is the slight hint of lopsidedness in divers the atmospheric sounds contained in it’s composition. 

Near the end, things return to somewhat awkward looping in “I am Chris’s Brain” and “Honeycomb Ghost Logic” with those familiar sparse percussion pieces keeping a minimal but near-consistent rhythm right degraded loops stretch out and contort strangely. The percussion feels comical at times, but it imparts a particular vibe that compliments the lopping motif quite well. At the very end though, we return to ambient sensibilities, but this time much more of an airy drone sound. “Tunnel Vision Haze” is the slowest burning track on the album, with extremely washed out sounds and a perpetual rise and fall that feels like a dull roar quickly gaining speed and fading away. It’s a rather weird album overall, but one that has a complex feel despite the minimal arrangements of just a handful of sounds.