Dredg -- El Cielo

10/10

Imagine it's about 100 years ago, night in winter, snow falling, and you are walking alone through a gaslit, fancy neighborhood. There is one old, two-story, forest-backed house at the end of the street, that's been abandoned for years, but tonight there is a dim light coming through one of the windows. You cannot help yourself, go in to investigate. Strangely, the inside of the house is well kept, magical, and a little haunted. Every room, photograph, and painting takes you to another time and place. It is as if you have entered the home of a mad scientist who has left to travel back in time to save the Earth. He succeeded, but now his house is abandoned, and its wonders lost to the world, except to you, lucky, inquisitive visitor.
That's what listening to Dredg's El Cielo is like:


2002 Interscope
1. Brushstroke: dcbtfoabaaposba 0:57
2. Same ol' Road 5:14
3. Sanzen 4:34
4. Brushstroke: New Heart Shadow 1:33
5. Δ 5:03
6. Sorry But It's Over 4:08
7. Convalescent 3:32
8. Brushstroke: Walk in the Park 1:40
9. Eighteen People Living in Harmony 4:28
10. Scissor Lock 3:23
11. Brushstroke: Reprise 1:33
12. Of the Room 3:44
13. Brushstroke: An Elephant in the Delta Waves 1:47
14. It Only Took a Day 3:16
15. Whoa Is Me 5:36
16. The Canyon Behind Her 6:40

A FINAL, TMI NOTE ON 2005: This album wrapped up that year for me. I'm sure to write more about that year, probably continuously until I die, but this is the album that came to me near the end. After all that I went through, and all that I lost that year, I felt a slow, continuous stripping away of myself until, by the end, I felt completely depersonalized, detached from everything in the world, including myself. I briefly chronicled the beginnings of these feelings here. For the last few weeks of that year, I actually took to sleeping naked, because I felt like wearing clothing was a lie, that putting garments on myself was a metaphorical deception because I was connected to nothing. I mean, I'm not crazy or anything. Anyway, I'd lie in my bed with nothing on in the middle of the night, watching the moon slowly rise and fall, singing the line from the song posted above, I cannot find the other half. And my mind wandered through the fields and forests, and over the river to the hills beyond in the moonlight, searching for it. And that is why only weird girls wanted to sleep with me...
The end