Album Review : The Caretaker - Everywhere At The End of Time (2016)
I love to find weird things on the internet. Not necessarily extreme or vile things, but stuff that’ll rewire my brain just by learning it exists. That is why I follow a gentleman named Pad Chennington on YouTube, who is really passionate about what I call internet music: vaporwave, mallsoft, etc. Music that did not exist when I was young. If I know there’s a six hours-long album about dementia and loss of identity, it’s because of him. It’s both awesome and terrifying.
The idea of The Caretaker’s Everywhere At The End of Time is straightforward enough, but it is such a lengthy, emotional journey that is executed with so much love and empathy that it’s impossible not to be affected by it. Released over a period of three years, it count six different stages of mental decay, which you can experience yourself through his music. Technically, it’s six albums but they work together like… let’s say Star Wars movies would?
Everywhere At The End of Time begins innocently enough with swelling, melancholic ballroom music buried under reverb and glitching effect, like it’s coming from an aged vinyl. When stage two kicks in, the music becomes more distant and discordant. Stage three starts breaking the songs down and soon enough, you start struggling to hear notes under reverb and static nothingness. You start struggling to remember melodies you just listened to.
I’m not spoiling stages four, five and six, but prepare your loins.
What makes Everywhere At The End of Time so unique and exciting is that it coerces you into feeling empathy for one of the most difficult conditions to relate to. When Taylor Swift writes about a nasty breakup, you relate because SHE understands how you feel. When The Caretaker wrote Everywhere At The End of Time he didn’t want to relate to you. He wanted you to relate to people who cannot possibly explain how they feel. That’s unprecedented?
No idea how he came up with it either.
Although you can find Everywhere At The End of Time in installments, I highly suggest you experience it in one sitting. It’s unobtrusive music that’ll allow you to work in the meantime, but I also believe that you need to feel the exhaustion settling in to put you in the correct mind frame. The music of James Leyland Kirby starts breaking up way before the three hours mark and the slow, gradual disappearance of coherence will make you beg for mercy.
I have never experienced empathy through music like this. In Everywhere At The End of Time, The Caretaker used length, memory and dislocated structure in order to make us feel in a way that is alien to us. It is thoroughly weird, but also overwhelming, dreadful and tragic in its own subdued way. Kirby put it out on YouTube himself for you to listen (linked above), which I highly suggest if you feel like experiencing something unavailable anywhere else.
7.7/10
