I Want To Love You A Creep Who Knows: The Acid Liminal Reviewed

Liminal comes to us from the Latin word limen, meaning "a threshold." Liminal the LP comes to us from pseudo-supergroup The Acid and is the subject of this week's indie music review. Defined as "of or relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process," Liminal is a very fitting title for this band's debut.

Headlining the trio that makes up The Acid is English DJ/Producer Adam Freeland, perhaps best known for his kickass White Stripes Remix, "Seven Nation Freeland." Joining him on this voyage of experimental minimalism are Bitcandy favorite RY X, and Steve Nalepa. With Liminal they've made a hell of an artistic statement that critics will adorn, but still has great pop accessibility.

Liminal isn't always easy listening; it can actually be quite disorienting in certain circumstances. But it is always interesting and the sort of thing that gets stuck in your head and you just can't shake.

THE ACID "RED"

Sonically this album feels post-everything. The expansive use of silence on the record can make it feel featureless at times, like you're drifting in one of those all-white rooms in a movie that's supposed to signify heaven or purgatory (am I the only one who confuses the two?). Liminal, and perhaps The Acid in general, is a swelling experiment in field recording, bass music, and electro-folk stylings. The whole thing is like a fever dream or Cormac McCarthy novel.

THE ACID "ANIMAL"

Perhaps my favorite song on the album is "Creeper," with its Master's Class usage of silence and space. A rumbling bass that faintly recalls NIN "Closer," as the whole track ultimately does, steers the song while Ryan Cummings beautiful and ethereal voice conceals the true eeriness of the lyrics. It's a wonderful balancing act The Acid pull off with relative ease.

THE ACID "CREEPER"

Ultimately Liminal is an exercise in restraint. Practically every song on the album feels rigged to blow, only they never do. This actually ticked me off the first time I heard The Acid, until I realized they know exactly what they're doing. They want Cummings' voice to be the main emotional lightning rod on this record, so they never give their songs the crescendo they seemingly deserve. The deep bass and minimalism can feel melancholy and dark, but there's a subtle beauty to the simplistically of these proceedings.

Allow me to get existential for a minute, if only because an album like this begs for it: 

Liminal is exactly like existence. For the most part we're just drifting in a sea of ambient noise, unaware and uncognizant of our surrounding. There are moments of genuine clarity and emotional resonance, but they dissolve as quickly as they appear. The whole thing seems to be building to a revolutionary climax, yet it never does and it never will. We've just been conditioned to believe it will/should because of the forms and narratives we're most familiar with. It's disorienting, difficult, but ultimately worth it in the end because it's all just an experience anyways.

THE ACID "BASIC INSTINCT"

Good luck figuring out whatever the hell I just wrote in the above paragraph means, perhaps I've taken a few too many hits of The Acid…

(Get it?)

About Calvin Paradise

Calvin Paradise manages to live a productive life despite a childhood of home schooling and suffering from what some doctors have called the worst case of Groucho Marx's Syndrome in recorded history.