Music

Humble Ledger (Gnostic States) - Eidola


This one is a bit weird. I’m a fan of weird, technical/prog music. Ranging from stuff like Dance Gavin Dance to Tool to Allegion to Cynic. (I’m basic, sue me.) There’s this weirdness to a lot of that music I love, even beyond the technical impressiveness of the music. I hadn’t heard the word platypus used in music often before getting into progressive music. Neither had I heard any songs about mathematical constants. You get these wonderfully strange worlds and odd shifts of tone and style in the middle of these songs. But as much as I love this kind of music, almost none of it is Important. I don’t know why. Maybe the weirdness and campiness and strange shifts in tone makes it hard for it to find a time where I would need it.

Humble Ledger is one weird exception. I really like Eidola in general, and I had been listening to their latest (as of 2022) album a lot that week. I found myself sitting on a strange wall at 2 am at night as one is wont to do. I had their music on shuffle and this one came up and something just happened. I did not know what the lyrics were. I did not know what the song was about. But there was just something so deeply enchanting in the song. The soft buildup of an acoustic song that I swayed to atop the wall to an energetic prog rock song felt so natural. Melancholy and contemplation turned to energy and action. I jumped down from the wall and wandered around in the dark, the whole world looking so exciting and open in the dark with the song playing in the background.

I don’t know what happened then, to be honest. It was a strange night. This is a strange song. It somehow fit perfectly both with where I was and where I needed to be and even though I have not been atop that wall since, this song is very important to me.