First things first, click the following links to see nice big versions of the front, inside and back covers, as always designed by the wonderful Tina, who at the very least deserves to be designing covers for competent and even marginally successful bands.

It feels like a lot of time has passed since the last album, although seeing as this is the fourth release of 2007 already I'm not sure why exactly. Partly I guess because this is a bit of a return to the songwriting style of 'The Bad Human' rather than the nice weirdness of 'Live Chase', 'Ropes To Infinity' and the Dream EPs. That probably makes it sound like a retrograde step, but what are you gonna do about about it? What are you actually going to do?

The most noticeable difference on here from previous albums is the inclusion of my priapism-inducing new EBow. I'd been meaning to get one for ages since it's an incredibly easy way for lazy cunts like me to sound cool, and I finally bothered to get one when fate conspired to both give me hundreds of pounds of disposable income and place me on a job approximately 150 yards away from famous music shop Johnny Roadhouse. It paid off, the first track I used it on here was 'These Are Not Random Events', which was pretty much a test noodle which ended up going on the record unedited. It dominates a few tracks on here; buzzing around on the opening track, providing the solo which is pretty much 'Millionth Song About New York's reason to exist, and being pretty much the entire basis for 'Death/Glory/Boredom'. Huzzah!

Tracks of note, then. The first thing I did for this was 'Eighties Revival Night Shotgun Massacre', with a slightly pointless titular swipe at the absolutely fucking endless veneration of everything from the 1980s. I think it probably had something to do with Calvin Harris' song going 'I got lurrrrrrrrve for you if you were born in the Eighties', which seemed to be aimed at morons my age who get dewy-eyed whenever someone plays 'I Think We're Alone Now' or mentions The A-Team. Anyway, I was slightly annoyed when I wrote that title and a few weeks later there was the big actual gun massacre at Virginia Tech in which 32 people died. In my defence, he wasn't using a shotgun, and it wasn't at an Eighties revival night. Also, who cares? Anyway, the song itself is one of those long and slightly bouncy mulipart things like 'New Product' which at one point rocks kind of a bass riff. I think the reason this record sounds like a companion to 'The Bad Human' is because it was done in the same one-step-down tuning, with quite a lot of it played in drop C.

'The Where?' and the ludicrously-titled 'Tiny Fragments Of Nothing Fired Into The Gaping Void (Hell Yeah)' (I was going for one of those big-concept Acid Mothers Temple/My Cat Is An Alien/Fushitsusha titles) kinda go together in their slow-moving ambience. Pop thrills, such as they are, are provided by 'Still' and the title track (which has some vocals on it, albeit not words). And the closer 'Scaling The Walls' is one chugging riff repeated for four minutes until it gets loud right at the end, kinda based on a marching acoustic thing I was gonna do for the MFO until...I don't know until what. It has some EBow wailing and some distortion anyway. 'Year Of The Indecisive' was recorded in 'New Standard' tuning, I think, and is a raw, unedited, played straight through with no overdubs bit of vibing.

'Priest' is probably the most off-beam shit I've done in a while; I was playing with the EBow and I realised that when I muted the strings with it, it sounded something like a dying saxophone. I'd been listening to Cold Bleak Heat recently, and watching a video of a Chris Corsano performance where he comes in honking freely on a clarinet, and the opportunity to do something slightly avant-garde seemed to good to miss. So I recorded a few tracks of this fairly freeform noise and then kept adding as much atonal fucking-about as I could stand. I literally have no idea how this will go down with people, if it goes down at all, and I literally only slightly care. Maybe I'll go off into increasingly baffling and inaccessible territory from here on in. Or maybe I'll intend to do that and end up doing proper choruses and singing. I don't think it matters anyway, it's not like there's a fanbase to placate or alienate. I just realised I could pretty much write some mad racist shit here, or expound some kind of conspiracy theory about world leaders and their satanic rituals, or start calling all kinds of well-respected public figures rapists, and it wouldn't matter because no-one will be reading this. That's kind of liberating. In the most boring way possible.