Apostle of Hustle - Eats Darkness [Album]

Arts & Crafts

August 3, 2009, 09:32 PM

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Apostle of Hustle started breathing life when Andrew Whiteman, Canadian born and temporarily Cuba resident in the past, wanted to create a kind of music he felt was missing. And indeed, in a way he succeeded; the music of Apostle of Hustle is hard to compare with any of their contemporaries. You could argue that their style comes closest to minimalist music, but their latest conceptual album - a serial poem about some struggles people go through as Whiteman called it - shows there is more than just that. With half of the songs being nothing more than filmic, poetic intermezzo's you can hardly speak about 'Eats Darkness' as a regular pop album and that makes its appeal a bit limited.

The band is basically not so much a 'song' band, but instead creates atmospheric pieces to bring over their stories about 'tactics and attitude needed in life during wartime'. The problem arising with this kind of conceptual album is, because the lack of inspirational music, the message tends not to come over all the time. However well meant, if you don't feel comfortable listening to endless repeating two chord, guitar riff based songs accompanied by drums that are unstoppable like a beating heart, with no musical technical specialties and a chronic lack of melodies or structure, the lyrics don't really come over. Whiteman himself stated that 'each track is like tapas at the banquet of conflict; a small contribution to the articulation of a fucked and beautiful world' and that's the big problem. Even considering the band is doing quite well lyrically, most of the real songs are so vague you can either interpret Whiteman as a heavily underrated poet or as a pretentious dick trying to be intellectual.

The idea of creating new music is worth a standing ovation, but with music that only stands out by not actually standing out and lyrics that you either get or don't get, Apostle of Hustle's 'Eat Darkness' fails to become the new 'Sgt. Pepper'.

For the experimentalists of the earth, the album is worth a try but like with most extreme albums, you're either gonna hail it as your new religion or curse it as something worse than lift [elevator] music.

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