Something Stars of the Lid were already very good at in this nascent stage was making drones that had an uncanny animation, as if their tracks were creatures and you could sense the life moving through them. The opening “Before Top Dead Center” is a darkly brooding piece of gently throbbing guitar feedback, and the swaying modulations suggest respiration, as if we’re watching the coiled potential of a giant reptile as it sleeps.
“Adamord” is where the LP introduces McBride’s eerie remnants of sound. We hear what seems to be an elderly woman talking about the difficulty of facing the day with a broken heart, and with this the piece slides into a metallic knock, spirals of hiss, and pulsing sections of feedback. At times, when we hear a fluttering oscillator, we sense the music’s distant but crucial connection to rock, the way the raw electricity that coursed through psychedelic music from the MC5 to Spacemen 3 could be abstracted into something a person might fall asleep to.
“Madison” is one of several tracks that allow you to hear what Stars of the Lid would become after refining their sound and inching toward modern classical. It has a symphonic bearing that pre-dates Eno and ambient music, a swirl of string-like tones that brings to mind the slowly gathering power of the prelude of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, with slow-motion splashes of cymbals and bows pulled across strings that feel like clumps of earth sliding down the side of a mountain.
So ghostly is “Madison” that when we hear lines of dialog from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in the opening section of the following “Down,” it comes as a shock. Back then, every documentarian worth their salt kept a tape recorder by the TV to capture such scraps, and here it’s yoked to another one, a recording of a preacher laying hands on a child and saying “God touched you in a wonderful way.” As his voice fades and we slide into an impossibly gorgeous passage of backwards guitar drone that seems haloed by mist, we feel in equal parts the creepiness of the pastor’s voice and the spiritual allure of his message—we could be rising to Heaven or falling into Hell.
While some tracks want to induce meditation or accompany druggy dreams, others challenge with tension and uncertainty. “Swellsong” could be from a Tarkovsky soundtrack, something that might play as we rumble through Stalker’s Zone. “(Live) Lid,” captured on digital tape at the band’s first public performance, is a slab of feedback that nearly veers into noise music, with some of the hard edge of Metal Machine Music mixed with cymbals and even a booming drum. And the closing “Goodnight,” also recorded live, includes a backdrop of actual rain behind the guitar. This natural sound has fascinated recordists since the beginning, and everyone knows how much a steady downpour resembles tape hiss.
