Over the last five years or so, we’ve come to associate a certain sound with bedroom-bred blog rock. We’d call it brash, torrid, noisy, sometimes experimental if we were in a particularly good mood, but never well-rounded. Last year, a certain Kishore Krishna released Snakeism under the moniker Adam and the Fish Eyed Poets and flipped our collective lids. We drew comparisons to Sonic Youth and Tom Waits, but we didn’t quite hit the mark. Krishna had his own thing going, and it sounded awfully like the work of a fully-formed outfit. While Snakeism (one of our top five albums of 2010) was dark and dreary, it sounded wholesome. This year, Krishna follows it up with Dead Loops, a more refined opus that follows a concept-of-sorts, all the while carrying a glint of optimism.
Thematically, Dead Loops loosely covers the same ground as its predecessor, though it’s quick to replace gut-wrenching melancholy with something more menacing. “Forced to react at 24/Should have been an engineer but what do I know/At least I know they don’t own my soul/But living with my parents sure kills the romance of it,” he sings huskily on album opener ‘Purgatory City’, though no obvious trace of sadness is to be found. He knows there’s nothing he can do about it, and that in essence is what Dead Loops is all about – a wretched kind of acceptance. Through 12 tracks, Krishna explores this very concept, channeling a vast array of influences, beginning with a fervent post-punk stomp, settling down in Tom Waits territory, and as the album draws to a close, moving to mellower, more conventional grounds.
Dead Loops is everything a strong sophomore effort should be, a natural evolution of the themes and sounds of its predecessor. Though the comparitively blander second half may seem like a let down, it’s still a remarkably well-made package, especially so when we consider that Adam AND the Fish Eyed Poets is just Krishna.
Indiecision: B
Listen to Dead Loops here.
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