The Daily Spin, July 2
Linus Alberg | Living on a Planet Full of Empty Life
Welcome back to the Daily Spin, the series in which I review 365 albums during 2023.
Today kicks off a special series called Saturday Nights at the Club, in which I review albums suggested by a Discord group of friends. It’ll run for the next few months, so every Saturday, come back for a little fun with each of these.
Each album will be given a rating on a scale from 0 to 10. You can look at the entire set here. Additionally, you can check out a list of my favorite song from each album right here.
If you want to suggest an album, good news! You can do so right here!
Album: Living on a Planet Full of Empty Life (2020)
Artist: Linus Alberg
Link:
Albums like this always make me feel a bit bad about not wanting to keep with the piano - sure, I pluck around on a keyboard when I have the chance, but I’ve lost a lot of the touch I developed by playing regularly and these days it’s hard to devote the time or money to learning again. These pared-down compositions, very Nils Frahm-like, hit me right at the core of what I love about the piano as an instrument, its ability to evoke sentiment all by itself.
I have but one nitpick with this record, and it’s one I’ve said a few times before - if you’re going to make a song anything above six minutes, it’s gotta be six really damn good minutes of music, and I just don’t think that the back half of this album hits that peak quite often enough for me to slot this into the nines.
This is beautiful, sparse, and perfectly orchestrated to reflect the title of this record - it does, truly, feel like you are walking amongst the hollow remains of civilizations long gone, as though you have come back to Earth long after the last human took their final breath, long before the Sun expands and contracts and swallows everything we’ve ever built. This is the Earth, taking shuddering breaths, still carrying on, the constant ambiance of the indomitable force that is nature persisting even as the rest has begun to disappear. This is the apocalypse, after the world has ended, when the dust has settled and all that’s left is memory.
And god, is it beautiful.
Rating: 8.8/10
Best Tracks: Jupiter; Orthosie
Worst Tracks: Cyllene