Daniel Avery – Ultra Truth review

It’s rare that the art which accompanies an album release has much of a relation to it’s inner workings, but the image chosen for Ultra Truth pushes the envelope well beyond stock images or symbolism. A cross between something diseased AI would create and a digital portrait, the unavoidable impression is of a melting synthetic head, the overwhelming pressure of modern times distorting it’s features and crushing the subject with it’s black hole weight.

Daniel Avery has acknowledged that his fifth album is the first in which he’s faced straight into the enveloping darkness of post-post-post everything omnicrisis: unofficially dedicated to his mentor and friend Andrew Weatherall, on it he’s created a sonic version of the picture, a composition made from things that are warped but still very much alive amongst the mind-debris.

This sculpting has finessed Ultra Truth into a masterpiece, threading together electronica’s disparate tribal sounds with a blistered humanity. It’s an emotional record, from the innocently naked piano of opener New Faith to Wall of Sleep’s technicolor fantasia and in the ending, with Heavy Rain’s blissful ride along the cloud tops. There’s darkness too, and an undercurrent that occasionally surfaces via white noise and paranoia, but for once, the cover image embodies a thousand perfectly imperfect sounds.

You can read a full review here.