Midnight World contains a lot of music for being so minimal. Sometimes, I stare at the keyboard. There’s only twenty-six letter keys on it, but I come up with new sentences all the time. With music, on a bass, there’s four strings. A guitar, six. Two drum sticks. And even at its most primitive and basic, there are almost infinite combinations. It’s all been done, but does that mean you deny young souls their time? When music’s lain so bare—from Supercharger to the Reatards to the Gories to Leadbelly to the Mummies—to Blacktime, it’s kind of astonishing; something so naked and raw and old yet new screams at you like a baby fighting a dinosaur in a lo-fi world. The blood and shit and screams are real. Proficiency in music is greatly overrated. Crawling back into the cave, it’s times like this—when wars are digital and kids look at vinyl records with the same expression they’d use during a rectal exam—that bands such as Blacktime make more and more sense to me. Great to listen to in the dark, too. –todd (In the Red)