The Spectre Sound - DEAD

The Spectre Sound

DEAD
self-released; 2015

3.8 out of 5

By Jamie Robash

They say that death is the ultimate hurdle and that once you can get past death, it’s all smooth sailing from then on. And over time so many artists from so many mediums have used the exploration of death to define their work. Most recently, The Spectre Sound, aka Adam Cool, used death as a catalyst to creating the six-song EP DEAD. 

Before adapting the moniker of The Spectre Sound, Adam Cool was previously the bassist and vocalist for the Salem, Massachusetts band, The Indoor Kids, with whom he collaborated as The Spectre Sound, for their 2014 EP The Color.  

DEAD was born as a series of projects for Adam Cool’s Computers and Music class at Salem State University. Cool wanted to make an album that dealt with the acceptance of death, though he also cites a breakup with a girlfriend and a solo trip to see the band of Montreal alone, had added to the emotions which he was processing during the making of DEAD. 

From the beginning, DEAD is a very experimental sounding record, although it is an experiment that has already been performed thousands of times before and many of those times yielding the same results that DEAD does. Though there are not more than a handful of producers working in electronic music today who are actually doing anything new for the genre. 

So it is with this fact in mind that one must look at DEAD. To be sure the tone and the beats of DEAD are in no ways uplifting and they won’t have you bobbing your head or hurrying out to the dance floor. Instead the six tracks on DEAD play more like a shattered soundtrack to a bleak movie. There are samples of electrocardiogram beeps blended with jarring synths at the end of “Vertical Gates” and seagulls cackling over dark swells of ocean waves on the sinister sounding “Peace at Mind.” 

Though Adam Cool is not doing anything wholly original as The Spectre Sound, on DEAD, he does well what so many other artists don’t; he picks a theme and see’s it out until the end, never wandering. And for that fact alone, this album, forged by fear and loneliness definitely deserves a listen.  

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