aaron schwab

my preorder of the new Dredg album came in the mail yesterday, complete with a sweet shirt, and i made a point of sitting down with headphones on tonight and listening to it in its entirety.

it’s called The Pariah, The Parrot, The Delusion, and, like all of Dredg’s works, the album as a whole runs with an underlying concept. though i’ve yet to try to make the connections myself, it’s apparently based upon Salman Rushdie’s essay, Letter To The Six-Billionth Person, referring to a letter that is ambiguously addressed to the world’s six-billionth citizen. Pariah’s album package is designed to look like a postage-laden envelope, and stamped on the front cover is the addressee “seven billionth,” so the album is presumably addressed to the world’s seven-billionth citizen. an interesting concept, and something i’d like to read more into.

musically, Pariah is better than i thought, and i’d already preempted it as my personal pick for album of the year. the production is phenominal, the presence of new instruments and sounds was unexpected and fit perfectly — it’s as if Dredg took the sprawling experimentation they displayed on El Cielo and Catch Without Arms’ concise sense of pop songwriting and wove them together in a way that meshes better than i could’ve imagined. Silverchair has a permanent spot at the top of my list of favourite bands, but if there was any ambiguity as to Dredg’s standing on the list before i listened to Pariah, i can say with a great deal of confidence that they’ve secured themselves the #2 spot (or possibly even spot #1.5.)

naturally, i’d encourage anyone and everyone to buy this album legitimately, but download it if it means hearing the whole thing.