We’ve Met an Impasse (By Midnight We’ll Be Naked)

It may be safe to say that art rock will remain alive and ponderous as long as bands such as Bay Area-situated Inventing Edward are around. By “art rock,” the high-falutin’ arrangements of such bands as Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer are not meant. More to the point is the Velvet Underground. In this case, the music establishes a sort of dark atmosphere against which the vocalist moans and croons sometimes oblique sentiments, all toward a kind of nihilistic epiphany of sorts.

Inventing Edward’s first CD release features mainly minor-key excursions, with lyrics like those adorning “Defiant Coals”—“He made me reconsider these lines/And the look of my hands/ You’ve got to take me as I am/ Or all I can say to you is/ I’m not sorry.” The dirge-like “Constant Reminder” sports a Procol Harum-sounding Hammond organ and the gloomy line, “I should close my eyes then I wouldn’t/ Have to see all that’s mine just slip away.”

Yeah, it’s mostly junior-year-at-art-college angst and grim pseudo- intellectual musings, but there remains a kind of charm in this band’s dark noodlings. Give them a spin the next time it’s raining out and you feel like being pleasantly bummed.