"I'm astonished and not sure what to do with it. With desperation and despair served up so sweet, this CD should come with a warning: the music will get you to the party, but the lyrics will leave you wondering how to get home. Suddenly, we've all had another round at Happy Hour. (Blessed be the medium of the pop song.) The more I listen, the more I can appreciate what a carefully crafted whole this is.

The first tip is Drift. How noticeably brief, that Eden of rhythm, belonging, effortlessness; the state in which we are not separate but part of an unfathomable mysterious and beautiful whole. Even as we wake, there's a tenderness and innocence to the moment we open our eyes. And then, it's over. We're born, we've hit the ground running. Dayjob Believer: a song as comforting as the radio station that wakes us in the morning. We step into a fluorescent reality where illumination is glare. Relief comes as a pitiful recess, a brief instrumental, and we're back at it. By the time we're in the car with Exits to Go, (a coffee-to-go of a song) that gentle nocturnal embrace feels as far away as our dreams. What we're facing is rude. (the methane keyboard says it all.) By the time the synthesizers are flashing red lights, we're passing the accident, looking the other way. Who cares who died....We're late to work. And here we're really getting into the existential swing of things.

By Omniscience, you know you're reaching the heart of this CD, because you can feel it breaking. Like a visit from the Ghost of Christmas Past, this song takes us back to another kind of accident site; the place where life changes when possibility dies. Here is the chance not taken, the moment that happiness slipped away. Understanding comes, but too late. Hope is now a memory, alive in the awareness of irrevocable loss. Get Bent (and Die) might seem like hope if it weren't for the whiskey. We cry out to love for inspiration to take the place of distraction. It's the drunken admission and plea, before sobering up for the Long Steep Climb, a little Sisyphean jingle with strength and real acceptance at its core. I love this song, because despite all calamity and misfortune, Love itself is named as the center of the journey, and this helps us continue the climb undaunted by the endlessness ahead." (continued)