Monday Surgeons

The vocals on Monday Surgeons’ Spirited Awasteland // Desperate Living are so blurred by delay that they almost resemble a repeating phantasm accompanied by spectral keyboards. The first side of this release sounds like someone took an old electronic score for a dystopian science-fiction film, put it to tape, left it under the car seat in the heat of summer, and then sampled that and added ghostly instruments over a warped rhythm track. Side two is brighter, more vivid, tonally effervescent and ethereal — like music for a natural setting away from the industrial smog of side one. Here the album breaks into a psychedelic pop-ballad opera, making for one of the oddest and most fascinating turns on an already strange release. At the end, what you have is Swans-esque, with lo-fi production fueling a sense of industrial menace.