Album Review: Adam Jensen - Hymns For The Damned

"I hate myself," Adam Jensen sings before the chorus in the opening song, "Cellophane". It's a bold statement to make on the first song of your debut record, which if you're like me is the first time you've heard anything from him. To set the stage of your record as being one of working through your self-loathing, you're telling the audience that this is not a record traveling down the arc toward the end of a rainbow. We're going to be digging further into our psyches, not our bag of self-deluding tricks.

The soundtrack to these thoughts is not of the more predictable, gothic sort. There is no gloomy melancholy of shimmering darkness, but rather a sound I would describe most accurately as 'grungy power-pop'. The guitars bristle with a thick fuzz of distortion, but the songs settle into catchy melodies that turn this record into, if you pardon the pun, fitting music for a pity party. There is an almost upbeat sense of fun to the suffering contained in many of the songs, which is something you can only understand if you are of a certain mental disposition.

"All my friends are dead or in my head," he sings on the second track. Most people have no idea what that feeling, metaphorically speaking, is like. I am one of those that does, and the spirit of that song carries a lot of weight with me. The mere act of writing these words is in a way proof of that, as I am more or less talking to myself about all of this. We who are so afflicted either write songs that become like friends, or we write characters that stand in for the people who are no longer around. I was recently commenting to someone that characters from sitcoms are a more constant presence in my life than most of the people I've ever known, so I understand where Adam is coming from.

As the record continues on, I'm torn on whether it more resembles Andrew WK's party rock filtered through the misery of we who possess social idiocy, or if it is the ultra pop-ified version of Nirvana that Kurt Cobain was fighting to prevent. When "Champagne Vein" opens with a riff that sounds like an inverted "Smells Like Teen Spirit", that connection was impossible for my brain not to grab hold of. In either event, there's something unique about this record that is hard to explain to people who don't see the world the same way.

Perhaps the best way is to say that with Adam's voice resembling that of Ryan Adams, this record is what Ryan's attempts at rock and roll would have been if he thought himself to be a piece of shit, rather than him being the only one who didn't realize it.

One of the interesting aspects of this record is that with so much fuzz on the guitars, this is a record where fidelity doesn't matter much. Listening to a pristine stream is powerful, but there's a gritty realism if the quality isn't quite there. It's almost like watching a restored version of an old movie, enjoying all that you couldn't see in the version you grew up watching, but still finding comfort the experience of the blur.

There has been a bit of a theme this year where my favorite albums have been dealing with how we process and persevere through the difficult times that are difficult to get out of our heads. We can be our own worst enemy, and often we think what Adam sings on "I Will Only Bring You Down". This record is not going to be for people who are happy, or who only want to be exposed to positivity. This record is thirty-three minutes of self-reflection that doesn't try to paint over the fact that things are not always what we want them to be.

But if you're one of those people who remembers all of the bad times more vividly than the good ones, why not remember them in the form of some memorable rock songs?