Dead Rider – Chills on Glass

Dead Rider
Chills On Glass
Drag City
★★★★★

It’s actually over? That’s it. Did I just sit through an entire album? What felt like five minutes have been over 40. What I can conclude from this rift in time is that Chills On Glass is better than anything they have done before and clearly an album of the year candidate.

If you want to hear the sound of a mind blown, than this album is the soundtrack. They take a song and mutilate it, reconceive it, take it apart, rebuild it and then use that as the groundwork for something completely new. Metaphysically speaking, where 90 Day Men looked at rock in an unconventionally fresh new angle, Dead Rider has tackled pop music in that same fashion.

Chills On Glass may be the greatest pop album you will never fully understand. It’s not even that you take a part of a song and then it blows into another direction. Here, you take a single moment and that moment could transform and move in any direction. Very intricately the band has taken this recording to micro-manageable microcosms of sound and within seconds, you could be fused inside a completely different mindframe. I cannot even begin to describe it with any more detail than that.

Dead Rider – Blank Screen

This is not an album for the album’s sake, even though there is not a bad song on the album, but you can pluck out a single song and be completely content in that technological approach. Just “New Eyes” along has so much going on with it that you could listen to it for days and always gain a new perspective on the song.

You think “Weaves” to be accessible as Dead Rider can be. Reggae singularity meets ‘70s-style falsetto turns into a weird parabola of twisted remains of what we would think is normal.

It just keeps going. “Of One Thousand” is noise extremism with a clear motive that makes exorcisms seem like a past time. When you extrapolate each song and look at it as its own entity you get one faction of interpretation. When you look at it as a whole, you get another that’s a strange rollercoaster ride that you wish you did not have to get off.

Chills On Glass is an album that should not and most importantly could not be replicated in the same context and immediacy as what Dead Rider produced. Consider this a unique moment in time as distinct as possibly can be. Mark this in the annals of history. You will not experience something quite like this again.