This Alone Above All Else in Spite of Everything

British (though now residing in Toledo) soloist Mat Sweet engages you in a fair amount of gloom-trotting. Across the album, he adopts the archetype of a ghostly storyteller, opting for tense, cinematic displays (“The Giant Umbilical Cord That Connects Your Brain to the Centre”). At times emulating Trent Reznor’s quieter but no less ominous electronica, at times drifting into a somber waltz of strummed guitars (“I Am Going Away and Never Coming Back”), Sweet is mostly a creature of confrontational mood swings, and is capable of maintaining calm for minutes at a time, but is always prepared to indulge his explosive tendencies, as he does on the brilliant exercise “Decapitation Blues.”