Third
Soft Machine

4 tracks and 75 minutes? This is a bad sign, isn't it? Track 1 is apparently live, but there is no clapping, so it's possible it's actually live. I fought with my ear buds for a long time thinking they weren't working but it turned out there just wasn't music for a long time, and I'm using the term music very loosely. There's like 5 and a half minutes of the sound of space whales crying before anything recognized on earth as a musical act takes place. Then there's some sort of space goose battle, I think I died for 9 minutes, though it's possible that either my brain was merely protecting itself or the space geese probed me in some way and I was temporarily beamed up to the mother ship. Anyway, when I came to, the song was mercifully ending. My ears hurt. Did they probe my ears? Maybe this is the best outcome for this journey. The next song is called "Slightly All the Time" which is how I would describe my tendency towards suicide while listening so far. This is much more like music. It's kind of a cool jazz at times, though it's entirely too goddamned long and is best described as the soundtrack of having explosive diarrhea and alternating between phases of having to stand perfectly still, walk briskly, run like hell, and finally release. "Moon in June." Oh good, they've introduced singing into the mix. Now my ears are definitely being probed. I fondly recall a time of space whales singing. I wonder if they were singing about their space whale version of wanting to be home and talking blandly about living through different instances of weather. If they were, they were doing it better than this. Holy space vacuum these lyrics are brutal. It's like stream of consciousness by someone with no consciousness. The latter parts of it is just awful ambient space trash with some sort of alien moaning peppered in. If this the sort of thing we created Space Force to combat, I'm suddenly much more invested in seeing them succeed. "Out-Bloody-Rageous" is more or less how I'd describe this being on the list. This song kind of starts off like a nice, ambient noise suitable for getting settled into a relaxing massage. And then the spacecraft from planet AuralTorture makes its approach. It does launch into some not totally unlikable jazz, so enjoy the few minutes of that before we reawaken to our massage and start the whole nightmare over again. They made this 8 times longer than it needed to be, and it's out-bloody-rageous. There was a moment at the end where I thought, "Wait a minute, this just got good. There is an actual melody and where has this been the last hour and a quarter of my life?" And then I realized the auto-play feature had moved on to Jethro Tull.

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