Songs From A Toxic Apartment

Album Review

Ever since the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, artists all over the world have attempted to tackle the concept album, often in an effort to comment on a social issue. Self-taught singer/songwriter Ethan Gold moved to Los Angeles to work on film scores, where he had the idea to create a concept album to "break apart the worst of the male psyche". He then began writing a rock opera, which dealt with issues ranging from Nazism to child abuse to pornography to war, and created a collection of 74 songs. Songs From A Toxic Apartment, his debut album, includes twelve of these original songs, all recorded, engineered, and mixed by Gold himself.

Despite the colorful story associated with the creation of the album, the individual songs sound relatively mainstream. On "Royal Flush", there are dark, ominous tonalities, but not any more so than albums created simply out of normal human angst or depression over a bad break-up. "Are We Recording" sounds like it was recorded at a home studio and ostensibly comments on the performance nature of life, but plenty of artists before have written about this issue in far more creative and aesthetically pleasing ways. Overall, the album is a varied, raw, and interesting collection of indie rock songs, but knowing the massive intellectual effort that went into it's creation, it falls short.