This certainly isn’t an album that you would want to listen to by yourself at night, in a dark room, while playing Resident Evil 2. I might go so far as to say this is way scarier than any Resident Evil game. This is an album that has the rare distinction of being “Lovecraftian.”
There really is no other way to describe the horror of this record. At any point in my listening experience I was prepared to hear “you fool, Warren is dead,” blare through the speakers and challenge my sanity. The entire premise of this album is completely abstruse. The first track is nearly five minutes but the second one is 24 grueling minutes. It’s like a musical twilight zone. Nearly every track on this album exceeds seven minutes minus the first one, which I consider an intro anyway. The way the music pulsates through the speakers is like the breathing of a sleeping giant just waiting to awake and wreak havoc upon some unsuspecting person’s ears. The music never gets too intense, but there is an intensity caused by the fact that it ebbs and flows to some unheard drum.
Everything about this album is disorienting in some way. The length of the tracks will have you wondering where you are. The sounds of this album are both agonizing and oddly delightful. The name Theologian fits this band very well—I suspect that the life of a Theologian must be a terrible and slow affair. Hours of reading circular arguments, never ending questions about the nature of divinity—it would certainly grate on my mind. This isn’t an album for the faint of heart. If you like Merzbow, Boris, 5ive’s Continuum Research Project or other doom/drone bands you might want to try this out.
In A Word: Challenging
