Before I delve into this album, let me make two acknowledgements:
1) This album didn‰’t have nearly the influential impact on music of the usual albums that I feature.
2) This album is my favorite of all time and I‰’m gonna write about what it means to me.

The most satisfying art has always been cathartic. The bloodletting of anxiety, fears, beauty, love, and everything that defines what it means to be a human being that’s impossible to be expressed in any other medium. The best art is beyond language and rationality and explanation. It hits straight to the heart and is immediately moving in a way that nothing else touches. For me, Grape Blueprints Pour Spinach Olive Grape is that work of art.

I found this album when I was 14 years old. It touched something then that it can still strike, seven years later, as the delicate little twinkles of “Planet‰” wander out in the shadow of a twistedly-pretty cacophony. I‰’m rarely enthralled with an album on first listen, but Marty Anderson was able to capture a part of me that I didn‰’t know existed, in only two minutes. I can still remember laying down in the tall grass under the summer sun, closing my eyes and letting the music sweep me away to another universe, where everything sparkled with unspeakable beauty and I had a crystal-clear view into the human psyche.

Thematically, the album is about Anderson‰’s incessant struggle to find satisfaction and his place in the universe. He‰’s terminally ill and bed-ridden for 16 hours a day while being pumped full of the IV fluids that keep him alive. As soon as the last crucial element emerges from the glassy cobwebs of interlaced guitar, I was sucked into the utopian black hole. Marty’s vocals are permanently on the outside looking in, and this album embodies the frustration, tormented beauty, and slanted glimpses of love that accompany being trapped by your own body.

Marty wastes no time getting to his point. On the second track, “People,‰” he moans, “And the earth keeps spinnin‰’ ‰round, there is a whole world above ground, giving it no chance, and I‰’ll take another breath and disguise myself to death, until there is no inside left, and I am laughing so hard,‰” each syllable elongated to perfect emotive power. Children giggle in unison ever so slightly in the background.

The album focuses on Marty‰’s willingness to abandon everything that defines his emotional history just for a moment of inclusion with the world outside his bedroom. His consistent self-loathing and struggle to break free of emotion itself is exemplified in the climax of “Alphabet,‰” where he confesses, “Having a heart gets in my way, so I rip it out everyday.‰” He’s Isaac Brock‰’s kin, who was able to silence these torturous feelings when he admitted, “I don‰’t feel and it feels great.‰Û

Marty‰’s story and his lyrical content are heartbreaking in and of themselves, but when combined with Dilute‰’s music, each minutia of expression are exacerbated perfectly. The guitar work is ethereal in an other-worldly way. Marty and Ian Pelluci‰’s guitars dance like starry-eyed lovers, each singing a melody that is preciously gorgeous on its own, but somehow manages to work as the other‰’s perfect counterpoint. The result is a swirling blend of melody that sound as heart wrenching as Marty‰’s vocals. The two ingredients sink into each other and make a perfect sonic mixture. Drums and bass provide the lighting and stage for their dance. As the songs build, cymbals flash splashes of light as the guitars glitter this aura like stars caged in the angular diamonds of chandeliers. As sublime as these arrangements inevitably become, they’re all ultimately killed by Marty‰’s inability to find that belonging he‰’s been searching for. Sharp, prickling notes hack at the arrangements like axes until the entire thing comes crashing down in a vortex of broken melodies and chaos, the victim of its own weakly heart. It sounds like a galaxy collapsing in on itself: dazzlingly bright and stunning, but simultaneously violent and fragmented. “0” climaxes as the entire song feels like it’s being pulled in half before bursting into firework explosion guitar chords. They immediately quench the tension that has built for 10 minutes as every shadow reveals itself as a musical deity.

Every single microsecond of a sound on this album is perfectly situated. The whole thing is concise in theme, texture, fragility, and beauty. By the end of the album, Marty‰’s finished with simply wanting someone to understand him and instead, begins contemplating his place in the entire universe. “Murdering your soul has slowly become allowed‰” and “It‰’s hard to have a broken heart when love‰’s the only way out‰” are some of the album‰’s later lines, as Marty has finds an impasse between continuing to search for the peaks of happiness while simultaneously wanting to eradicate the agony of coming up short.

White, clerical and melancholy, Grape Blueprints Pour Spinach Olive Grape‘s every note sends chills through my spine. I hear this album and I’m right there, 14 again, cradled by every blade of grass as I melt into the sun’s blissful warmth until each joyous grin feels eternal. This album celebrates the highest highs and the lowest lows that your heart will undoubtedly drag you through in life, and somewhere along the way, it discovers what it truly means to be alive.