Extramundane

Extramundane carries its title's meaning — beyond the ordinary world — in its actual construction. The guitars are tuned and played to create overtones that seem to hover slightly above the fretted notes, generating a halo of sound that makes the whole track feel like it's existing in two registers simultaneously. The tempo is deliberate without being sluggish, and the rhythm section provides just enough forward motion to prevent the song from becoming pure atmosphere. Kadane's vocal delivery here has a particularly searching quality — phrases seem to extend beyond where you expect them to end, following the thought rather than the beat. The emotional landscape is one of estrangement from the familiar, that particular feeling of looking at ordinary life and finding it strange and insufficient. It belongs to the intellectual strain of 90s indie rock that was less interested in catharsis than in examination — bands that treated songs as essays rather than confessions. The production has a warmth despite the subject matter, a kind of affection for the very world being held at arm's length. Reach for this on nights when insomnia has made your own apartment feel foreign, or when you're sitting in a place you've known for years and suddenly cannot recognize it.