My first experience of this album was the audiotree sessions version of “Dealerships,” a reasonable primer in both frontman Matthew Milia’s astounding lyrical craftsmanship and the band’s tight musical sensibilities. Despite this technical prowess, the song manages to maintain an incredible simplicity.
Over the course of Eternity of Dimming, Milia regales the listener with blankets of oh-so-typically-American minutiae (strip-malls, parking lots, relentless highway lines, late-night diners), along with a veritable plethora of sentiment as he seeks to claim agency over the unwieldy domain of his native southern Michigan. The listener is alternately jolted from molten melancholia (such as that wrapped up in the aptly-named “Junk-Drawer Sorrow”), awed by tempo-confused eclectic pieces (“Surgery”), and charmed by lo-fi paeans that sound as though they’ve fallen straight out of a cellphone conversation onto cassette (closer “Funeral Family Flowers”). Throughout, the band bombards you with fuzzy synthesiser washes, plucky banjo lines, and those sweet, sweet organ melodies that one can’t help but fade into.
I have many things I could further say about this album, but I’ll leave it at this: I cannot stress enough how strongly I recommend Eternity of Dimming as a solid, moving and enchanting aural experience.
4.5/5