Jagjaguwar doesn’t put out bad records, and No Rest for Ghosts won’t be the exception. Minus Story come to us from Lawrence, Kansas, kind of, but might as well have just stepped of the bus from Athens, Georgia, 1997. This record has a real Elephant 6 Collective feel about it: sprawling psychedelic pop experimentation with simple, catchy melodies.
As far as I can decipher, this is a concept album, the subject of which are the moments before, during, and after death. I could be way off the mark, but that’s what I see and hear.
My favorite so far is the song “There Is a Light,” which is about the very moment when life escapes you: “There is a song you hear when you die/No clapping of hands or voices on high/But out of the dark the voice will rise/So close to my ear/My old lover’s sigh.”
Lyrically, the over all feel of this album is of a hopelessly lost soul searching for any reason to continue, and being let down a few too many times; of constant thoughts of the coldness and freedom of death, and the simplicity of just giving in; and of the frustration of the occasional ray of light.
I may be painting a somber picture here, but that’s not what this record is like at all. You don’t notice the lyrical content unless you sit there and read the words along with the music, which goes from straight-up poppy to experimental noisescapes within the same song. Almost like The Beachwood Sparks last album, Make the Cowboy Robots Cry, with some Radiohead thrown into the mix.
– Bill Barry
Minus Story (Jagjaguwar)