The Kevin Costner Suicide Pact

Much as Brian Eno’s Apollo was the breathtaking soundtrack to the visual grandeur of the film For All Mankind, Decay may have been conceived as music for the current state of American society and its power and influence in the world. “Mayflies (for strings and pedals)” is an eerie mesh of dark, sharp drones and a song you might have heard in an old movie to suggest better times long in the past. If anyone ever makes a movie of Gene Wolfe’s classic Urth of the New Sun series, this group of songs, heavy with a gorgeous duskiness, would fit perfectly with scenes of establishing a world where the golden age is a distant memory, buried by a run-down present. Despite its lush atmospherics, the album feels rusty and gloriously decrepit, like, yes, urban decay.