Lost Inside of Mitch Murder’s Fever Dreams: The Real Deal

And so we’ve come to this: a concept album based upon the Walter Mitty-esque dreams of Mitch Murder, a Wall Street IT worker from the 1980s. He apparently dreams not in symbols or stories but the saccharine melodies and purely synthetic pop of incidental music heard in the opening credit rolls of movies. And I have to say: he does it incredibly well. If you’re not feeling a bit of uncanny valley in “Call Waiting,” just wait for a minute. Everything here is shiny, twinkling, fabricated all of one piece and with no sharp edges. Imagine someone took Alexander Robotnick’s sleaziest Italo and made a Muzak version of it, which was turned into a MIDI file for the sheer hell of it and then performed, in a cover version, by an A-ha tribute band secretly made up of only one keytar savant who hired four of his friends to mimic and sashay. It’s just like that.

Play this for any two people and you very well may find one smiling with the sweet narcotic release that comes from nostalgia while the other begins nervously looking for escape routes from this nightmare. This has taken the celebration of the ’80s to its apex and its logical conclusion, in making an album so ’80s that even the ’80s had nothing like it.

Update 3/15: Now shipping on limited edition vinyl, too.