High Watt Electrocutions -
Night SongsReviewer: Joel Geraghty (StonerRock.com)
Label: Introspection Records
Release date: available now
High Watt Electrocutions is the ultimate vision of an exceptional artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, by the name of Ryan Settee, who performed and produced basically everything on this first full-length release,
Night Songs, in his own studio.
Night Songs is a concept album in the classical sense, presenting an esoteric epic that has no fixed storyline, but follows the events of one long and strange evening, as each track has a traditional song title and an exact time of night. Beginning with the chaotic "Sonic Maelstrom (9:30 pm),” High Watt Electrocutions uses a variety of instruments and other techniques to effectively create a range of moods that match the time of night and title given for each track. They're all about textures and feeling, and when there are vocals, they're often buried in the mix under the swirling fuzzed-out guitars, strings, percussion, and other layers of sound.
Settee draws from a deep well of diverse influences to compose his own brand of experimental psychedelic drone with High Watt Electrocutions. Despite being recorded over a seven-year period from 2000 - 2007,
Night Songs is a cohesive work that demands to be heard as a whole album, rather than as individual songs on a CD. For that reason, the album is a challenging listen at 68 minutes in length, but by the time 6:00 am rolls around and the nine-minute mellow instrumental "Sunrise" brings the dawn of a new day, it's all worth it. The only complaint I have is the mechanical drum-machine beats behind some of the songs, but there are enough other things going on that this can be overlooked, and in fact at times the coldness of the drums fits the theme of the music. The recommended setting for
Night Songs is a long dark night of solitude and heavy drug use; at that point, it should all make sense.
URL: http://www.myspace.com/highwattelectrocutions
