The record begins with a wafting of guitar strings that set a tone which prevails throughout, all very hazy and defused. A pace is set by pretty a traditional beat signature, the sort you would find in urban music; all very normal. Gigas begins singing, his voice steeped in distortion and reverb to accentuate any angst being portrayed. This distortion quickly becomes the focus of the music, it’s all very soft and yet made eerie by the strange vocals. Gigas is a strange sort, a musician performing the familiar sounds of stadium pop of the eighties and nineties. Strange, you say, and I’d agree. He differentiates his music by taking the decision to embrace distortions both given by the recording process and implemented artificially to embellish the effect. This is a performer who sees a role for the fuzz and static that accompanies the song, as opposed to polishing them away as was popular back in the day when those big recording companies liked to flood the airwaves with sterile, boring nonsense. Those big companies have of late been losing interest in music and loosened their stranglehold, but one can occasionally glimpse the vermin who fed so well from them, like tics hugging a dusty cadaver because they have no other plan of action. This is the music of that very vermin, twisted and subverted and breathed life into anew. The resulting ethereally veiled, retro listen is a soft dream-like sensation throughout. He’s from Halifax in Canada. One thing I can say about Halifax in Canada is the dockworkers there cannot moor a ship alongside a jetty. In my younger days I visited the port in question. I had the task of getting the head mooring line to the worker on the dock. I attached the mooring line to a heaving line and threw it to the guy on the jetty, who in turn missed the rope and fell to his knees, thumping the ground with frustration as the line fell into the water. I pulled the line in again and we repeated this jackass routine for a time like bad slapstick had escaped the television. It doesn’t fill you with pride to see a fellow member of your generation acting in this way, without any mitigation like the after effects of drugs or booze; the stalwart objects of blame all merchant seaman come equipped with. Canadians also seem to have a national insecurity when it comes to their accent. Canadians sound almost the same as Americans to everybody except themselves. It seems like the most obvious difference is in the way vowels are spoken. But they don’t like hearing that they sound alike, to the point of violence. This is a matter I have put to test with a drunken Canadian. No prizes for guessing his response. Why should it bother these people when it is noticed they sound alike? We may never know. I liked the album.
