The landscape that INVSN and Refused frontman Dennis Lyxzen creates in the debut session by this Swedish band is one that's un-fuck-with-able. It's one of those moods that has no artifice. It's as authentic and intense as it gets when the walls feel like they're moving in on you and the days are getting more and more sinister. He brings us into these places in the old meatpacking districts of creaky, big cities. He takes us there after dark and he drops us off, leaving us alone, with a chill in the night and a sense that something's going to reach for us from around the corner.
The quiet clicking or shuffle of a shoe's sole against the boomy acoustics of a cloister of sad, depreciated buildings that mostly smell like exhaust and cigarettes and look as if they hold dirty secrets, rings out and makes you wonder about how many unseen people are hearing those clicks and shuffles. You're convinced that you're not alone, but then, maybe you are. You'll never convince yourself that you are though. Then you come upon some movement, as I did the other night, there near the water's edge in a rusty part of Brooklyn, near a cramped interstate, and there are two men operating a fort lift. You cross to the other side of the street, against a sagging chainlink fence and some stubborn, scraggly weeds and you smell fresh bread as you pass by the backside of an inconspicuous bakery. It's still dark. You still anticipate getting jumped and mugged, but these men are baking bread.
Lyxzen cooks these elements into his writing -- those parts where we're still fearful of what's possible, or what feels likely and lining it all with the parts that allow for tiny bits of beautification to just happen to those various midnight-ish marvels.