Sometimes, you come across an album perfectly describing where you are in life. Hell, if not you, then perhaps where the world is. Here in America, things are progressively getting worse. This is putting it mildly. You don’t even need examples when BREAKING NEWS reels go off every damn day. It can weigh down anyone trying to get by with their will to live intact. Some people just want to disappear into a forest and never be around a fast-paced, conglomerate-run city ever again. Unfortunately, like many of us, SARN—the anonymously named musician who appears like The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy‘s Arthur Dent, the character placed in the middle of an unexpected, hyper-surrealist future world, after he has shared one too many philosophical conversations and beers with Marvin the Robot—doesn’t have that option. Only, instead of his house whisking to a dumber future, he watches it operate from his smartphone.
SARN himself reports from a place where Murphy’s Law, which states whatever can possibly go wrong will go wrong, and “Yhprum’s Law,” its optimistic flip side, happens in extremes. However, the former feels like it happens more often than the latter. From general discrimination and technologically-induced anxiety on 2018’s god wya omw to racial maltreatment on 2018’s HELLATRIPPIN and 2020’s REAL SHIT, SARN creates as if CNN was made for nervous wrecks. If the album title of his latest swansong, i’m am in dark places, says anything, it is that he’s past the point of anxiety; he is just plain done. With everything. He has given up all hope in wondering how to make it right. Genuinely, for some people? Relatable.
Since then, new demons have popped up, such as a rising yet reportedly fracturing white supremacist regime and the Palestinian genocide. Like many of us, SARN is just trying to get home with some spark of a soul left. Unfortunately, shit will happen, and it will affect him like anything else. Hell, the music throughout the album can attest to such a feeling by blending wonky electronics with bare acoustic guitars, almost as if indie rock worked despite plenty of loose wires poking out. The way SARN softly whimpers on “sad,” the opener fusing video-game synth stabs with post-punky guitars, it is hard to tell if he may be feeling depressed or is just plain apathetic. Hell, possibly both. “I threw my phone in the Walmart trash,” SARN sighs as he also noticed “apps been tracking all [his] tracks.” But the content appearing on said apps is a collection of temporary highs and devastating lows: “just death, porn, death, left, where to eat, right, left.” Later, SARN reveals what turns out to be the album’s main thesis: “I don’t really need no help. I’m already fucked up by myself.” And boy, is he ready to let you know exactly how deep the feeling of being fucked up has been running lately.
SARN isn’t new to sharing his intrusive thoughts at all, but on dark places, intrusive thoughts are so much darker. The ramshackle follower “it was RAINING!!” has lyrics either worring or intriguing an average black metal songwriter. “I tripped on a pile of paperback Bibles, pierced my left eye on a rusted metal spike,” SARN recalls in his thoughts. Don’t ask where the nail came from or why children were playing in the blood in his imagination. Just know this isn’t the last time rotten luck even appears. The tragically catchy and stylistically proggy “good boi,” featuring singer, songwriter, and longtime friend John Vanderslice, flips from a sturdy indie rocker into a soaring space rock denouement that will likely impress members of Oakland’s former Anticon. Rapper, singer, and songwriter WHY? finds him brushing his teeth with hemorrhoid ointment and accidentally blushing his contacts after a drunken vomit. Oh yeah, and he takes boner pills for the fun of just watching the growth on “freakin’ out.”
How do such deep, dark feelings affect his relationships and approach to them? His answer is not to let the sense of spiritual death make anyone feel like he doesn’t have a heart or a conscience. He pleads with a lover on “Pillow” by saying, “I don’t wanna be this way.” He also admits his “love was not to scale,” but no matter the strength of the sentiment, it just cannot overcome the nihilism, as he states, “these are just words.” Similar attitudes appear when he surveys a longtime pursuit for a successful dream and how at odds it is with him getting older on the ambient sigh of resignation, “DUMB.” After all, SARN has been making music since, if going by his discography, 2015 with Foreign Feeling. He may not have a lot of control over what happens, but his grip on the real world as it is now should signal further where SARN’s mind is at. He’s dying inside, but all he can do is laugh. And honestly? Same.
And so, album closer “driftin,” opening with Fargo synths before bursting with clean guitars and blasting drums, finds him throwing his hands high with what’s left to figure out the best option for leaving this realm. On “reckless,” he suggests the least one can do is “remember the way that I was and we were when I was ok.” As ideal as it may be to end the album and this review on a cheerful note, it is more realistic to ask if we are truly okay with the times we live in. If not, likely this album is one you’ll connect with: the one for when everything in life, both inside and out, gets too much, you just want some refuge from the ever-compounding madness, and somehow it just never comes. But for the listener, maybe it just might.
