The Consolation Project “Face Your Demons”
With an album like “Face Your Demons”, I wish I could say that I had only one of these two factors bear an unreasonable amount of weight on me, but alas, it was a combination of both.
The lyrics (And we’ll get further into them in a moment) play a large part in my psyche being affected but it would be quite less impactful if they were simply being spoken. The music itself does play its part. Some songs have the traditional influences I like to pull out of albums from “Ship of Ghosts” feeling a lot like Radiohead to “The King of Darkness” having a Fastball sound to it.
But to say that these songs are dark would be a vast understatement. In my mind, these songs make Robert Smith sound like Justin Bieber. (I’m not entirely sure what a Justin Bieber is, so I hope I made that joke properly) A song like “In My Chest” brings out the 8 bit video game sound, which teeters back and forth from “Pretty Hate Machine” to “Downward Spiral” era Nine Inch Nails, but even that doesn’t seem that dark since it, you know, could be something in some distant sense you hear in an Atari 2600 game. A song like “Curses Come Easy” sounds like it could be in that newer radio rock vibe along the lines of Snow Patrol or one of those other bands I dare not name, but even that’s more of a poppy sad sound than something so dark it gives you chills.
Musically, I feel like this album is exceptionally well done. With different lyrics, it may or may not have had the same affect on me—I cannot say. But these lyrics are just entirely too dark.
When I was fifteen years old, I knew that I could never fully and completely explain to anyone how I felt inside or they would lock me away forever. That was my biggest fear up until I turned thirty. Then I actually spent some time in a psychiatric hospital and much to my surprise they released me. Now, some would say (Mostly I would think) that I simply told them what they wanted to hear and played by their rules just so I could get out of that particular hell. Some would also say that my medications aren’t cutting it and, well, a phone call to my doctor shows that when I recently moved my dosage was upped for that reason. Do I feel better now? Do I feel like I can continue my life without this dark piece inside of me? That’s only a question that I can answer and quite frankly I feel like I’ve exposed enough of myself in this review already. It’s not that I don’t like writing about myself, it’s just that it only has so much to do with the music.
I cannot quote all of the lyrics I want to; there simply is not enough time. You just need to listen to them for yourself. But this is what would happen if you lived inside my darkest place. Knowing what I went through months, hell years in advance to my complete mental breakdown that I’m not fully recovered from nearly three years after the fact… this is a way of understanding that—by listening to these songs. “You’ll never win” is not a line sung repeatedly in the second song, but rather the soundtrack to my conscience.
Essentially, I can listen to this album because I can go to my darkest place and (for the most part) be all right. Can you go to your darkest place and be all right? That’s a question you have to answer for yourself because this album is some powerful voodoo. I listen to it because I enjoy it and sometimes a dark song is the only way to get through the dark times, but no, I am not ready to face my demons just yet, which is probably why these songs haunt me ever so.
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