The opening sequence to Ethan Gold's Songs From a Toxic Apartment is almost too fitting: a once-empty hallway punctured by a series of sharp footsteps, the rattling of house keys, and the opening and shutting of a creaky door. By the time the song, "Why Don't You Sleep?", gets to its soaring chorus, it paints a perfect picture of the insomnia and desire for escape that color the album. While immersed in recording demos for another project, Ethan Gold's physical health quickly deteriorated. He later learned his residence had been besieged by a variety of poisons before the health department considered the apartment unlivable. The titular "toxic apartment" was frighteningly literal, forcing Gold to move his recording setup-- and the rest of his belongings.
As the title suggests, the album was recorded in full in his apartment (though thankfully not in the one littered with flakes of asbestos). You wouldn't know it from listening, however. Gold's production prowess first came to the fore on Elvis Perkins' debut album, Ash Wednesday-- a close companion of this record in terms of emotional and existential distress. So Songs is not so much lo-fi as it is low-budget. Nothing on the record bears the mild sterility of a professional studio, while snatches of white noise and sounds from outside of Gold's living room window are subtly filtered into the songs.
Naturally, most of the tracks that make up Songs From a Toxic Apartment deal with toxicity in the emotional sense. On "Poison", Gold's emotions are sent into a whirlwind as he asks for salvation and tries to stay motivated as the devil stares him down and his relationships are damaged by sex. The album has a childlike emotional purity to it, but that's not to say that it's immature or naïve. Instead, it's rooted in the fact that children don't obscure their hurt by anger or bravado or even mock diffidence, as adults often do. Occasionally, the songs are bogged down by grating lyrics or unnecessary bridges (such as on the breakdown in "I.C.U. (Toxic)"), but for the most part, the emotions on Songs From a Toxic Apartment are delivered with an unfiltered, glaring legibility.
"Are We Recording?" finds Gold tangled up in nerves and hunched over his mixing board, facing his self-doubt with fears like, "We don't know what we're doing yet." The fears exists even when he thinks he locates his artistic muse: He is quietly huddled in a corner, softly strumming a guitar during "That (Reprise)", singing, "This is what I am," before letting out a long sigh. During "Royal Flush", he compares love to an intense game of poker, breathing in stale air and staring across the table at someone inscrutably surveying the five cards in their hand. Songs From a Toxic Apartment is a one-act play whose scenes are cast by one bright spotlight and minimal set changes.
On closer "To Isis Sleeping", Gold tests his use of dynamics by introducing countermelodies and pulling them away after a moment's notice right up until the dramatic finish, as the instruments fade out into the sprinkling drops of water falling into the shower floor and running down the drain. And just like that, the curtain closes on the toxic apartment, and you're left with your own four walls staring you down.
