Sometimes it feels like you're screaming your lungs out and no one can hear. You sit in total silence. Abjectly still like an empty vase full of dust and spiders. But there is a sound that is scrapping your insides. It is peeling the paint off the walls like a jet turbine that has just been flipped on inside your chest. It's almost too loud to hear. And if you were to ever let it escape the ventilation of your muzzle, it would surely deafen the neighbors and create a public nuance on the scale of a superfund site. I'm talking as if everyone feels this way. I'm not sure that they do. All I know is that this is the whirlwind that lives inside me most days, and that it's albums like No More Blue Skies that remind me that I'm likely not alone. The third LP from precisionist and vocalist Andrya Ambro under the name Gold Dime, sees the NYC avant-sonourbanist teaming up with bassist Ian Douglas-Moore, guitarist Brendan Winick, and Gideon's lambastist Jeff Tobias to rig together a kind of sonic noir for the damp spark of the soul. No More Blue Skies is cinematic in a sort of impenitent manner- the things that it gives voice to are barely understood and rarely cognized, but through sound, they are given vivid visual delineation, where in sensations become embodied forms, feelings are given limbs, and confessions swirl like crimson blended in a whip of shadow-cast monochrome. I see a naked sprint across the Jornada Del Muerto. A golden eye pensively watching from beneath the ruffled hem of a pulled curtain. A pour of human soup foundering down the maw of concentric triangular hieroglyphs to pool in the belly of a temple's keep. Like all good noir, the album reaps its rewards by reaching into the depths of unknown terror, a nightmare known as humanity, a floundering state of existence, baptized in the garbage spouts of modernity and self-deceit. Cast a deadly spell and see the clouds fill with the absorbing cackle of hungry black fowl who will clean the soft cowardly flesh from the jaundiced bones that lie below. A revelation will come upon you that all-purpose is perverse in the light of all promises fulfilled, no matter how troublesome or capricious. The glint and glimmer of gold that one sees at the end of one's journey, is in truth, the plating on a dagger waiting to turn your spleen into a cock-tail hors d'oeuvre. The mystery it permits one to unravel is as slippery and winding as your own guts, and just as likely to end in a hot heap of shit. It's not an album that rewards your investment as much as it makes you its prisoner as a function of your own morbid curiosity- the same way a cat will bat at a loaded pistol, tempting it to unleash its fury, out of dumb wonder and an unconscious death-wish. No More Blue Skies is the sound of a voice that cannot scream, seen through eyes that wish they could look away.
