linoleumville is a conceptual project about a fictional town in the 1950s and is made up of a concept album & a literary zine. The album is called “A rip where a river should be”. I am a fool for concept albums, and if you have read any of my other reviews, you would know by now that I always make connections between music and film, and try to describe what each musical work I get in my hands would be the soundtrack to.
Subtle, whispery, raspy vocals are one of the trademarks of this album. Acoustic guitar parts and bass, and other sounds that sometimes resemble music boxes or inverted guitar chords. One of the most important layers in creating the sonic character of this album is definitely the samples. They are done masterfully, whether it’s drums straight out of Trent Reznor’s audio library, or Radiohead-style lo-fi beats, as well as dialogue, buzzes, field recordings, little scratches and sounds all over the place, weaving a textural web of audio layers without which this album would be something completely different. Featuring the voice of Prima Hera in two of the songs brings a nice balance between male and female vocals and adds some extra depth to the album.
“Circle” and “Hope you do” are my favourite tracks, even if only because they are so different to each other but still in the same album and serving it wonderfully. I could think of similar artists to list here, but frankly, this is some very unique work (I could only compare this to some of Pain of Salvation’s conceptual work, but even if you know who that band is, maybe the connection here only exists in my subjective brain).
Now I should warn you that there may be SPOILERS ahead! This is as close to a movie as it gets, if you remember I mentioned a zine. After you read that a couple of times, the whole concept starts to form before your eyes. In a small town, there is a character called Wallace who meets a local waitress named Connie. Now Wallace is quite possibly a time traveller, as there is some kind of portal or spacetime rip somewhere by a river close by. Wallace and Connie end up being together, but at some point she follows someone called John Gregory to the river and eventually walks through that “portal”. She probably never comes back, and Wallace goes around in circles in time, reliving his precious time with her but also trying to prevent that event from happening, but it keeps happening every time.
Now this is my understanding of the story, and I may have gotten it right to some extent or not at all, that is the beauty of it at the end of the day. But as soon as you get into the story, the album becomes much more multidimensional because you can imagine the characters and their storylines and the songs being the soundtrack to them, and personally I loved that.
Written by Spiros Maus
