The finale of the unwinding melancholic trek based upon regret and loss, Macaque Sauna boils their piano cascades into its boiling point. ‘What I Didn’t Say’ speaks of that emotional release, spiraling upon rougher recordings that utter the needed burst of painful tenderness to cherished ones that will never come back.
‘What I Didn’t Say’ exudes the lingering movement of pain amidst the unsurmountable sense of loss and regret, where the elongated ambient pieces serve to let out what Macaque Sauna has been rummaging within for the past two years. Represented within their piano compositions, exhaling drone pieces with heavy tones inserted through the layers of wafting rawness of the cloudy textures that remind of how much that ache digs itself through a person’s overall state of mind. Missing the person you care about every day and wishing for a day that they might come back, only to realize that they are not returning to you, crushing that hope away at the end.
If ‘Yesterday I Thought About You’ muses through that melancholic feeling within a half-hour isolated, foggy musing and ‘Balance’ is shaken apart with the shrill tones as you look into the distance and watch the planes pass you by, ‘What I Didn’t Say’ is the day where you sit down in a bench on an elevated grassy terrain, able to reflect in order to find some kind of peace while you zone out, looking at the bright lights illuminated around you. The compositions and the textures themselves offer Macaque Sauna’s revealing sensitivity, where the piano tones blare and rubble within the overall shambling, rougher recordings. The melodies themselves are fraught, piling upon cascading chords within fidgety tempos that open up a wealth of emotional dourness. Paired with the minor chord focus and the slower momentum, these pieces essentially go through the hard process of letting it all out, all with fractured cracks and fits. It’s not exactly a pretty sight to see or hear, yet Macaque Sauna’s melodic structure unearths that human essence, one that coils within the regret of not being able to say what we wanted to share with those that we closely cherish or at least care about even despite being not too close.
The trilogy might not exactly end in a calming ending, yet there is something about the pain that will allow people to nurture the connections that they see and message throughout their lives. It’s tense and anxious, where the notes just ramble in blistering succession before it cools down to express its most vulnerable moments. Macaque Sauna entails what they wanted to say within these notes, a pain that will forever cut them as long as they live.
Favorite Tracks: ‘A Meditation on the Efficacy of Chemical Burns’, ‘Death and Rebirth, Ad Infinitum’
Least Favorite Track: ‘I Feel Nothing’