A title like “Stack Lyf (Inauguration of the Megaslump)” can be a lot to take in but Spirits in the Pillar infused its latest album Scaled-down Expectations (which released on October 7, 2022) with a great deal of creative ambition and deep social awareness. This song gets to the crux of the core anomie of the modern era by laying out a visceral, experiential perspective on how modern capitalism has extracted value not just from the environment but from all realms of human endeavor and existence down to how you spend your time and channeling your dreams and aspirations along specific lines to bolster the process of funneling all goods to narrower destinations at the highest places of the economic ladder. Iain Rowley gives voice to the pain and desperation and frustration of the time with a palpable intensity of feeling and the music that winds around and helps to manifest a critique of and resistance to the process is somewhere between art rock and the angular post-punk one would expect out of a band on Dischord. Think early King Crimson meets Fugazi. This aesthetic runs throughout the album and the band offer us a particularly vivid and poetic distillation of the psychological pain of an era and an analysis that points to ways of dismantling the process at least in the way one orients with the world as it is. Listen to “Stack Lyf (Inauguration of the Megaslump)” on Bandcamp where you can also listen to the rest of Scaled-down Expectations and connect with Spirits in the Pillar at the links below.
Spirits in the Pillar on Twitter
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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