Every man, beneath his exterior, is a balladeer. Torment. Anguish. Even the most mundane workman harbors pains like a secret, waiting for a significant other to pry it out of an iron heart. Even truck drivers and the most emotionless father has some country song they want to cover that’ll express their hearts’ secret depths. Sam Lowry has this though: What about accomplished musicians who’ve never dipped their feet in cathartic music? Apparently something has happened in the soundscape mind Lowry’s made, and he wants to bring every listener along through the fucking wringer.

The heart-wrenching opening chords on down songs from the exile suite indicate that Sam Lowry has a skeleton in his closet so big, that it’s left him utterly devastated, and that all he can do is crudely craft this requiem for an atrocity to make amends. And normally, these utterly self-deprecating platitudes get old and boring. They lose all insight, and just focus on tearing themselves apart for others to bring up. (Normally at this point in the review, I’d quote a lyric for illustrative purposes, but I’d waste my entire word space by typing the entire album’s lyric sheet, now wouldn’t I?) But Sam Lowry, or Mat Martin (his real name) knows this. He used to be a music critic for N4U (his pseudonym for this project is taken from the main protagonist in Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and is the ultimate Kafka/Orwell character.) So down songs isn’t like that; it’s so relentlessly self-effacing, that it’s indicative, but conscious, of something painfully terrible and regretful.

The opening synthesized accordion chords on “Weakest Man Alive (Prologue)” indicate that whole bury-the-sad-melody-in-kitschy-instrument mentality Radiohead so displayed on Kid A (this and Kid A were made around the same time, so it wouldn’t be apt to compare the two). And then there’s the apparent Sparklehorse influence, which Martin saturates with several vocal models—sometimes, he sounds like a muttering Wall-era Roger Waters, sometimes like Leonard Cohen or Johnny Cash. But where the album gains it unconventional grounds is that it maintains a hip-hop beat—that’s where Martin lets his ska/funk roots come in. And the key, which acts like Folk Implosion have never learned, is to get the emotion into it. Despite all the elements going on, down songs is ultimately an isolation album. And for a concept album this personal, that’s the only thing that needs to be done.

Is it a tad over-long? A tad monotonous? Yes, but really, what desperately heartfelt-but-ineffective apology isn’t? Down songs is the endlessly wasted apology, gut-wrenching mostly because you know, really know, how ineffectual it is. And all you want to do is make it better. That’s the plea down songs makes. It sadly relishes in the inability of even music—the most intuitive, primal, and emotional communication method—and its occasional inability to communicate just how sorry people like Lowry are. I wonder if whomever this extended apology is to will ever hear it.

You may never find a more personal album produced in this vicinity.