Dilute‰’s Grape Blueprints Pour Spinach Olive Grape is an album of extremes and contradiction. Instruments dance around each other like migratory birds, individually chaotic but with a warped cohesion in the grander scale. Voices sing with glassy fragility, but slowly tear themselves apart until they become knives of unbridled noisy energy. Thematically, there‰’s a constant pain of alienation and rejection, but simultaneous redemption and exaltation in their cathartic celebration. For the entire experience, the album demands to be listened to in its entirety, but since this column is about single songs, “0‰” best exemplifies what Dilute offers.

The 11-minute epic begins humbly, but even the single introductory guitar melody is teeming with the heartbreaking beauty and tension that the song realizes in its climax. Drums enter the mix as well as another guitar that adds body, punch, and creates melody and harmony that swirl and turn themselves inside out. Marty Anderson sings about giving up everything and making “it our place to be losing the race.‰” Ultimately, these shortcomings are necessary in maintaining universal order.
Tones have slowly darkened and bright cymbal crashes are more prominent. When guitars tangle to the point of inseparability, the song bursts into a gallop as notes wiz around one another like flies released from a jar. They eventually find order, but there are two distinct halves, one dissonant and one melodic, yet they fit one another perfectly.

The song slowly drifts toward either dissonance, but finds unity in the middle while piano grounds the composition. Everything spaces out and becomes incomprehensible but gathers itself once again in crunching quarter-note chords that slowly oscillate apart. The elements sing two final chords in unison before a brief silence to punctuate the divergent piano melody and guitar dissonance. Everything gets quiet once more while notes scatter about before returning with soul crushing and uplifting force. The piano makes its way back again and dances with the furious buzzing bees in guitar. The album‰’s extremes have come together at last and the result is breathtaking, but lasts only a few seconds before shattering itself and picking up the pieces as “Vs.‰” begins.