Album Review: Caught in the Wake Forever - Against a Simple Wooden Cross

Album Rating: A-

What happened to your biggest demons? How about the moment when you realized your life wasn’t quite what you thought it was, or that night you were tossing and turning, hoping to find your old self? The key moments of your life you’d prefer to keep buried are wedged together effortlessly by Fraser McGowan to make a panorama of tangible loss on Against a Simple Wooden Cross. This album was constructed with glimmers of hope, but its defining factor is its pervading grief, its raincloud of despair. While the positive moments are a certifiable force they can be chalked up to the necessary yang to the yin of nights without sleep, snapshots of a life lost in a single nightmare. Skirmishes with our worst demons. Protests with life, and brushes with death. McGowan is a shining example of a man successfully combating his despair, turning his biggest nightmare into something tangible and admirable.