A quick glance down the tracklist of this album should reveal at least one thing – Joshua Neil Geissler, the man behind the music of Worrytrain, is fairly unlikely to win any awards for being the happiest chap in town. It would be safe to bet that such gems as “For Auschwitz,” “Hospitalized,” “Cambodia (Piano Duet)” and “Exorcism for Cello and Malaria” are not exactly going to be all kittens and rainbows. And while this is, indeed, a fairly bleak record, it’d be wrong to suggest either that it is oppressively so, or that it suffers from any lack of variation as a result of this.

In fact, although there is a generally pessimistic feel which resides in all of the tracks on Fog Dance, My Moth Kingdom, this pessimism takes several different forms. Pieces like “For Auschwitz” and “Achtung, God” utilize beautifully eerie strings as the main means of conveying it, while the frantic swathes of explosive static in “Thundertrance Interlude” and the middle section of “Satumiidae” provide a similar feeling in an entirely contrasting manner. Similarly, the calmly swaying, rich, and mid-drenched piano of “White Phosphorous Angels” provides a great contrast to the militaristic snares of the aptly-named “Soviet Passages.”

The one problem of this album which really stands out to me is the lack of continuity which is caused by the contrasting nature of each song. Each and every composition is bizarrely comforting and endearing in its bleakness, and as individual tracks they work exceedingly well, but there is next to no transition between each one (despite the similarities which are undoubtedly present amidst and playing off the contrasts) and I can’t help but think that either very little thought was put into the track order, or (very possibly) that there simply isn’t an obvious logical order for them to go in. The former I feel to be slightly unlikely, if only for the first song being called “Prelude For Piano And Malaria” and the last “End Theme”..It seems, rather, that Geissler has written a set of tunes which simply don’t lend themselves to any particular order. In this sense, I think that if I were to be listening to this just as a collection of songs as opposed to an album, then I would be able to give it a higher rating. It feels more like a portly child’s bag of pick-n-mix than a connoisseur’s selection box of expensive truffles. I’m quite happy to be a portly child every now and then, don’t get me wrong… It is simply the case that I cannot picture myself listening to the entire album all the way through again, but will instead return to individual tracks. These are some truly haunting pieces of music which are, unfortunately, simply not suited to the format of an album.

-Fred Bevan