The titular system referenced in the Art of the Unseen Infinity Machine is life and whatever force keeps it churning away. The title of Allegra Krieger’s fifth proper album (and second for current label Double Double Whammy) has her giving a name to that unseen entity/cosmic power that she’s been trying to make heads or tails of since she started putting out recorded music. “Everyone needs something to hold,” she sang back on 2020’s “Rot”, whereas on her new album she’s much more desolate and pessimistic. “Just an unraveling / A travelling / Into a slow wandering death,” she despairs over a jagged guitar riff on “Never Arriving.”
That she’s a little more cynical this time round isn’t surprising. After surviving a fire in her apartment building, she thanks the mysterious forces that woke her up, facing her with a “wall of gray smoke” before she escaped. A near-death experience like that will unsurprisingly change a person, and across Infinity Machine Krieger is just trying to make sense of it all. “What do you know about living? / What do you know about dying? / Other than you just do what you do / Yeah it’s one or the other,” she contemplates on “One Or The Other.” There has to be more than the two states, but what really is living and what really is dying?
Krieger doesn’t find a satisfying answer, but the explorative small journeys narrating her inner thoughts are fascinating to take in. “You’re just a fleck of light passing by,” she offers on the brief opening track “Roosevelt Ave”, sounding like we’re joining her as she ambles down the street taking in life around her. Over intertwining guitars on “Absolve” she’s blankly seeing what isn’t there; “Something here is missing / It’s the absence of some proof.” There’s anger and frustration in this lack of definite answers. On “Came” she’s yelling into the void over squawking electric guitars as she tries to find feeling amidst the numbness, even in an intimate moment, while on penultimate track “Where You Want To Go” spends its last 90 seconds expelling frustration in a fidgety and quietly seething solo.
Pared down from the ornamentation of last year’s I Keep My Feet on the Fragile Plane (and the b-sides collection also released in the same year), Infinity Machine is a small setup of indie folk rock, but it’s very effective; little gets in the way of Krieger’s philosophising and reflecting. Instead she uses an unexpected souring chord in a song to throw it off balance (“Into Eternity”), a disarmingly frank line to make you do a double take (“I want you to come inside of me tonight / To feel some light grow from within,” she asks on “Burning Wings”), or itchy guitar notes to capture inner conflict (“I’m So Happy I Cannot Face Tomorrow”). There are layers here, but the album is never dense: poetic but approachable; worried but grateful; worn down but quietly optimistic.
That finding light in the darkness is the anchor the album needs to stop it spiralling too deep into the well of joylessness. Surrounded by suicide, cops, homelessness, and piss-smelling subways, a yellow butterfly suddenly appearing in the New York streets offers a brief respite on “Into Eternity”. “Over And Out” reckons with the tangle of finding one’s way through life when surrounded by turmoil. Even the short “Interlude for the Undefined” feels like a reprieve, a meandering, slowly waltzing snippet of piano among the electric guitars.
And even when Krieger is despairing at the world around her (see the snarling “How Do You Sleep”, which points fingers at capitalist structures and the fossil fuel industry) or despondent at the death of her neighbour in the aforementioned apartment fire (“Nancy from the second floor died / On her bed with an open door / She tried to get out but must have turned around”), the glimmer of hope for this life or whatever comes afterwards shines through.
In the face of not knowing what awaits us on the other side, she makes a modest request on final track “New Mexico.” “When I leave behind this crowd / Could you say my name out loud / Let the echo fly light and free,” she requests. A simple act of remembrance, to prove that we exist for a moment in this universe, at the behest of whatever is controlling the infinity machine. “And you can start forgetting me,” she finishes. With tender moments and wistful observations aplenty on albums as good as hers, Krieger will surely not be forgotten anytime soon.
