Good Lord certainly does Giveth us some good music with their debut EP, “The Many Varied Shades”. AHAHAHAHAHA. But on to the review!

DUM DUM DUM! Thus starts our musical journey! Brooding stuff, perhaps the interiors of a smoked out cafe come to mind. There are sounds and samples of things shifting around a loose, hollow drum banging on in the background somewhere. It’s live and unedited, with a classical string sound underpinning the whole thing. It’s repetitive, loopy, in the best possible meaning of the word and associations that might come to mind, and so on. But it’s not all like that! Oh no! The first track soon fades out, after a mere 2:02, into a something even more ambient and strange. That’s what Good Lord giveth to their listeners. A musical landscape is being experimented with. There are voices, it’s terribly schizophrenic one might even say, very ambient and chill-out besides the first track.

The first track is strangely energetic, the rest are a little more Mogwai in their sound. But that’s alright. It’s only eleven minutes, but if you put it on repeat you wouldn’t know it ever ended. Unless you played it like 129347384 times of course.

This EP is maybe not the work of a genius, nor that of a fool, but more somewhere in the middle of things. It’s…good. I almost wrote “god” there. But that is not what I meant. I meant “good”. So I deleted it and wrote “good”. I could have just added an “o”. But I didn’t. I deleted the word. That is who I am. Hard-working, perhaps unnecessarily so, but nonetheless. Also, a fast typer. So I can afford to do such things. I could have put “god” because the music has a heavenly assocation in my mind. There’s a picture of a soap statue in a worshipful pose on the cover.

Year Released: 2004
Label: Magnanimous Records
Related Link: GLG at Magnanimous Records
Date Reviewed: 2004-04-12
Author: C. Michael