DESPAIR

When Omar was drunk one day, he decided that creating this monster can be quite a good idea. It is not, sadly, but I can understand that year 2k9 wasn't completely fine for everyone. Or maybe only certain months, period of weeks, because some his other releases from the same year sounds good, or even great.

This is dark, but dark as void. Cold, but as empty tomb, where you're not enjoying the fun, because it fails to terrify you. This ain't progression, nor experimentation, because this is just circling around one tone. Let me state that all tracks sounds basically the same. And I don't mean that they are let's say all symphonic, or all upbeat (like "the same" when talking about other albums), but they're alike. There's no difference between them and it's quite sad. This album doesn't provide anything interesting, not even for fans. Who would enjoy this after all, except those who likes to suffer from terrible sound. Again, I don't mean terrible as in Extreme/Death Metal, because EDM can be quite interesting and some may see perfection in it, something that even I can understand (and sometimes see myself). But this is blasphemy. Trap for bold listeners, who venture to explore new realms of prog, only to find this ugly, abandoned, one eyed, filled with body tumors and crippled child that haunts waters of "Prog" label it carry because of other albums.

1(-), because this is absolute opposite of what I can like. Or enjoy. Or consider interesting. Or Proggy. Or even listenable.

Another noise based album from ORL and this one is definitely more palatable to me than his collaboration with Jeremy Michael Ward, even if I still don't think that his attempts at noise are that engaging. The main reason for this is the approach taken with Despair feels far more focus on crafting atmosphere rather than the more abstract sensibilities demonstrated with Jeremy Michael Ward. The dark, ominous atmosphere this has ends up making it a more tolerable listen to be put in the background and one that feels considerably more focused and cohesive as a whole experience with less instances of these disruptive eruptions of feedback that do nothing but kill what little flow there is. I definitely think there's something to this album, as there are moments of genuinely compelling atmosphere throughout, but on the whole this is just way too meandering to justify its length and is another noise experiment that doesn't fully pan out.