Four Island

Oh my, this is embarrassing. Through careful play count and funtime analysis, it has been discovered that my fifth favorite album of 2012 was the one that I created, A Profoundly Sick Society by The Gates of Sleep. Stay tuned for a massive advertisement. In all seriousness, however, this album made my list not because I think it's a musical spectacular (in fact I have a bad case of creator's dismay), but rather because I had such a good time producing this album. Of course, by producing, I mean shitting around in Audacity, but, details.

This album wasn't a completely solidary project, however, like the first one was. For instance, there were several prospective cover arts for A Profoundly Sick Society, including the original random Flickr one, some weird Tellytubbies, and a vial of a dubious substance, but in the end, the final cover for the project was one created by my good friend Drifty, who combined these covers and several other pictures relating to work on the album. I really appreciate her work there, and I think you'll agree that the final cover came out very nicely:

Following the release of my first album, I Might Be Wrong, I almost immediately set into working on two new tracks: a playful ditty on drug abuse called A Cupcake In My Head and a mashup of an unfinished Imogen Heap song and a Lily Allen song called Back To The Song That Never Was. Production then ceased for about two years. How fun. It all started again, however, when I was listening to Valley of the Dolls by Marina & the Diamonds and playing with repeating the first second of the song. That's how Frigid Earth came to be.

The album itself is quite a doozy. While the name "A Profoundly Sick Society" was randomly generated back in 2009, it wasn't actually until I started creating music again (and in particular, I think, after the song Poland was created) that I really came up with the concept for the album being the cruelties of society. For instance, Poland is ostensibly about World War I, but it's actually about LGBT hate crimes. COHOSE YUOR CLOOR seems to be an insane song on dyslexia, but it's actually about the pressure to conform. The Breakfast Professionals appears to be a fairly innocuous ditty about buying cereal, but it's actually a propaganda ad for mind control cereal. You're loving this, aren't you?

Some tracks, like These Days, were created using the standard I Might Be Wrong formula of mashing up songs into something insane, and other songs, like Skinny Dipping 4 Love, were entirely written and recorded by me (though Skinny Dipping 4 Love also features the beautiful voice of Drifty). Some of the production I did was incredibly fun. Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society is both badly autotuned and somewhat dubstep, and if that's not enough reason to listen to it, well, it's about vampire pumpkins, which are A Real Thing or so I have read.

Each track of this album is equally insane, and I almost worked hard on them so I think you should give the album a listen if you want you know don't feel pressured or anything it's okay I don't mind. There's also a plethora of album related work: These Days, Skinny Dipping 4 Love and Poland were all released as singles and have at least two B-sides each, and after a few more months I released a remix album containing surprisingly little remixes, and containing more really weird shit.

A Profoundly Sick Society was an intense project, as well as a personal and kind of depressing one, but in the end I had fun and I can actually enjoy some of the fruits of my labor. ThreadStop, in particular, is my favorite song. It also occupied a great portion of 2012, and this is why it fits into my favorite albums of 2012: because you can't help but love your children.

EDIT: This is my 400th post! Whoo!