Kirby’s Everywhere at the End of Time is an ambitious project that spans a whopping six hours and thirty minutes. Listening to the album uninterrupted can be challenging, The Caretaker, and the experience is far from easy listening. The album demands the listener to be in the right headspace to fully appreciate it. This review delves into the haunting depths of Everywhere at the End of Time and how effective it is.
Who is The Caretaker?
Leyland Kirby, also known as The Caretaker. He is an electronic artist. His repurposes old creepy-sounding Dixieland ballroom songs. He adds his own blend of dark ambient, vintage vinyl crackles, and other production tricks. His music possesses a paradoxical quality of being simultaneously nostalgic and deeply unsettling. Kirby has elevated this quality to the next level in Everywhere at the End of Time.
A Lofty Ambition
Everywhere at the End of Time is a collection of 6 albums spanning 3 years’ worth of work. The albums catalog the different stages of dementia from Stage 1, where memories are still intact, to Stage 6. The main character is now well past the commenting phase and on the verge of passing away in an infinity-edge environment of subterranean drones and pillars of whispery white noise. It is an incredibly lofty ambition, but how effective is it?
The album is a six-hour-and-thirty-minute journey through the different stages of dementia. From the early stages where memories are still intact, to the later stages. Whereas the protagonist is consumed by an abyssal zone of low drones and walls of staticky white noise, nearing death. The project is a collection of six albums, spanning three years of work, cataloging the progression of the disease, with each album representing a different stage.
While Kirby’s project is undoubtedly ambitious, it is not an easy-listening experience. It demands that the listener is in the right headspace to fully appreciate it. This album is not something you’re likely to walk away from feeling good about. Instead, it lingers in the back of your mind like a bone-chilling horror movie, replacing positive thoughts with unsettling ones.
A Gradual Decay – The Caretaker
The glacial pace of this effort accurately reflects how dementia patients’ minds typically deteriorate in a way that is very progressive. Things seem reasonably cohesive for the course of the first three CDs and roughly as many hours. Even though they get increasingly fragmented and buried as time goes on. This is particularly clear in the song Libet Delay. It has taken from the album An Empty Joy beyond This Earth. A once stunning melody has become drowsy and despondent.
An Unsettling Experience
The Caretaker, The third album has a generally more enormous sound that makes the music seem farther away from the audience. As although it may be absorbed by the environment around it. This trend continues as the album moves into Stage 4, one of the album’s only failings as it marks a jarring departure from the previous 3 albums. However, the attentive listener will be able to parse out some barely audible melodies from earlier movements, buried very deep beneath the surface. The remaining portions of the journey are oppressively desolate and nightmare-inducing, and the sixth and final CD culminates in an impenetrable cloud of ambiance. Unsettling song names like Long Decline is Over and Place in the World Fades Away are examples of such music.
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Why Make or Listen to Everywhere at the End of Time?
Does the argument raise that why manufacture or listen to this? Why would somebody want proximal dementia? It’s a terrible thing. And is it even possible to achieve something within that ballpark anyway? Without subscribing to the creepy-pasta Internet culture obsessed with hyperbole, everywhere at the End of Time does possess a sort of disturbing quality to disorient the listener and make them question what they’re hearing.
Final Thoughts
Mileage will vary greatly between listeners, especially when considering that Everywhere at the End of Time is by and large an album that appeals more to morbid curiosity than anything else. You’ll have much to adore about Kirby’s masterpiece if you’re the kind of individual who can’t take their eyes off disaster and deliberately portrays themselves as scared and disturbed. Such complaints seem unimportant in light of how ominous and (ironically) memorable the end product is Everywhere at the End
