Best Subway Music Ever

Gastr del Sol's fractured soundscapes are the perfect complement to the morning urban commute experience. I was listening to Upgrade & Afterlife yesterday morning on the way in to work, and it took me an hour to claw my way out of the dream-like haze.

The compositions are detached, yet oddly empathetic; they wreak of a sort of post-apocalyptic solitude, propelled forward by deliberate, sparse piano/acoustic guitar explorations and punctuated on occasion by bursts of electric static. As I listened and looked around, I saw a landscape where we were all out of phase with one another and our surroundings. We co-existed temporarily in the same space - the subway, the street - but as voyeurs, passive additions, adding nothing to the whole. Eyes bored straight ahead or skimmed over the scenery, and eyes never met other eyes. Everything was gray. And the electro-acoustic interplay enhanced the feeling that there was something both deeply human and strangely inhuman going on.