A Year Closer

In their music of the past twelve years, Maths Balance Volumes (Mankato, Minnesota) has made music in and of a hometown overshadowed and unsettled by its history, music for a world in which things have never been okay. Traditional American folk genres seep in at times, but never as the incarnation of a living popular culture – only as ghosts or unliving effigies
“A Year Closer” tells us already in its title what its theme is: approaching death, time ticking away and getting closer with each track of the record. Musically, “A Year Closer” is a series of pieces that make symphonies out of separate processes of decay and disappearance: unidentified cracking and creaking objects, broken equipment, and lost melodies that seem to have escaped other songs and wandered into the room looking for a place to hide