• Luke Awtry
• Kevin Bloom

(Self-released, digital, vinyl)

The nature of music criticism in 2024 is as weird and transmuted as the industry itself. Long gone are the days when a journalist's pen could derail a musician's career with a scathing review or set them on the path to be the Next Big Thing with a five-star gush over a new record.

Those stakes have been erased as music has been demonetized. When listeners had to debate whether to spend their hard-earned dollars on a new record, they often relied on critics to guide their hand before they got to the cash register. In the current world of low- to no-cost music streaming, there's no risk in opening an app, seeing a new song and clicking play. If you think it sucks, just keep scrolling. This new normal has once again made the single king: Artists often release half of a new record as "advance singles" before the LP drops — if there even is an LP.

But some artists still fly the flag for the long-form album as an art form. Take Burlington psych-rock band the Dead Shakers, the project of singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer Kevin Bloom. Every Dead Shakers album is a movement, a symphony of indie weirdness, vacillating between modes of hippie freak-out and apocalyptic doom whimsy.

On both the debut LP All Circles Vanish and 2022's Some Shapes Reappear, Bloom crafted records built on solid foundations with inventive architecture, brick houses in the storm. Yet the psychedelic revelry often obscured the vision and planning coded into their creation.

• Courtesy
• The Dead Shakers, So I Guess I Keep Making Albums Until I Die?

On the Shakers' latest album, So I Guess I Keep Making Albums Until I Die?, which drops on Friday, September 27, there's no mistaking the brilliance of Bloom's designs. A 20-track opus all but overloaded with drugged-out fuzz rockers, ambient field recordings, acid-jazz freak-outs and Bloom's hyperactive, often dichotomous lyrics, this is the long-form album as art.

The record kicks off with a fitting mantra: "Take my hand, the world is open / Take my hand, the streets they are crowded," Bloom sings in harmony with a veritable chorus, featuring Robber Robber's Nina Cates and Zack James, singer-songwriter Peg Tassey, indie-soul singer Ivamae, and cellist Izzy Hagerup.

If they bid hello to the listener with a pleasant, pop-leaning opening track, they make it plain that things are going to get weird as the song melts into "Graveyard Revisited." A sort of fucked-up vamp of anxiety and distortion, it features Bloom's voice echoing into the ether as he laments the violence of American culture. He even name-checks the F-35 fighter jets he hears soaring over his Burlington recording studio every day.

Ever a clever sequencer, Bloom keeps listeners on their toes as the bubbly, alt-country-leaning "My Garlic and Me" jangles along. Featuring a guest vocal performance from State Radio's Chuck Fay, the track is the charming kind of weird, like a radio single from an alternate dimension.

Moments like that are key on the new record, as Bloom populates much of it with interludes such as "Oversam Hand" and the all-ambient "Drunk, Retelling the Story of the Burning Bush," an explosion of guitar feedback and plodding, Phil Lesh-like bass lines. Bloom's talent as a composer comes through on these interludes and experimental forays as he stitches together the threads of an ever-moving musical tapestry.

Another appeal of So I Guess is the way Bloom interacts with his peers in the Burlington indie-rock scene. "Telepathy" is a hallucinogenic duet with fellow songwriter Greg Freeman. The lurching, dirgelike song builds up a miasma of sounds into a slowly rotating squall over which Bloom and Freeman intone, like two beat poets filtered through a grain silo. Saxophonist Dana Colley from '90s-era Boston indie band Morphine makes a memorable cameo, lending his distinctive baritone horn to the track.

Perhaps the most curious turn the record takes is at the halfway mark. "Exit the Path of Totality" marks Bloom's interaction with April's total solar eclipse. He camped out on his studio roof with some gear, making field recordings of people on the streets below witnessing the eclipse, as well as composing ambient music live on the spot.

"To be honest, the eclipse affected me even more than I thought it might," Bloom said at his studio a few weeks ago. "The experience of seeing it and feeling it, and trying to score it live, it just seeped into everything."

The eclipse score manifests on the album as three separate ambient tracks: "Exit the Path of Totality," "Enter the Path of Totality" and the album closer, "Totality." It might have made more sense to bookend the entire record with the tracks, but Bloom doesn't write that kind of book. His records are akin to finding the Dead Sea Scrolls or some other long-lost tome; they're meant to be deciphered and studied closely, even when the song is called "Jerry Garcia's Corpse, Adorning With Plastic Flowers, Is On Sale Now!" or "Bow and Be Simple 2: More Bow! More Simple!"

Altogether, the album is a vibrant, overstuffed, grandiose piece of music nearly an hour long. I couldn't think of a less commercial record and more rewarding musical experience in 2024. It may be true that the music business no longer has the infrastructure to grapple with a sprawling, artistic and just plain odd record like this, but there's nothing anachronistic about what Bloom has created. Forget what an album used to be; this is an example of what an album can be. We just need artists brave enough to risk making them.

Fortunately, based on the title alone, it doesn't appear that Bloom is going to stop trying anytime soon.

So I Guess I Keep Making Albums Until I Die? will be available on September 27 on streaming services.