Word: knoxes
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Along with the final track, the album is completely devoid of emotional content--a record of a man sitting in a room pushing buttons. Knox has a healthy urge to experiment, but when his self-indulgent nature takes over completely, the result isn't pretty...
...Knox's sound revolves around primitive Casio drumbeats, trebly guitars overdriven to the point of mushiness and his own strident warbling. Many of the tunes are based on progressions so simple that the verse and chorus are actually sung against the same set of chords--a technique which results in mind-numbing, repetitive songs. Almost every track also contains some old-school synth rhythms which, when used over and over again, quickly start to sound hackneyed rather than inventive...
...Knox must have realized at some point during the recording process that he was essentially laying down the same track 14 times in a row. In order to address this problem, he chose, rather than to actually alter song structures or arrangements, to sprinkle in a couple of choice sound effects. After all, nothing spruces up a drab song like some bagpipes or a nifty sampled siren or alarm clock...
...such overwhelming uniformity that any deviation from the mid-tempo indie-pop blueprint established early on in the album is at least a brief treat for the listener. The bizarre lullaby "Gold," for instance, breaks up the monotony, as does the mildly groovy "Engaged." After a few moments of Knox's self-important crooning, the sad truth becomes clear: the slow songs suck...
Towards the end of the album, things really begin to fall apart. The songs get longer and lose the one thing that made them at all compelling in the first place: pop song structure. Without verse-cho-rus-verse (or, in some cases on YES!!, chorus-chorus-chorus), Knox is completely lost. The final 18-minute track is a masturbatory opus of noise, static and tape and synth-looped sound effects...