An album with a reputation for being extremely difficult to listen to due to its sheer length and bleak content, Hope Was is the third full-length album by Arizona-based vocalist/guitarist/keyboardist Michael Plaster, part of his still on-going Soul Whirling Somewhere project (of which he is the only consistent member, save for live drummer Jason Farrell). Plaster's work tends to be described as dark ambient, but unlike most musicians in that scene he has a strong acoustic backbone to most of his songs, with live guitar and percussion ringing through the electronic soundscapes.
Clocking in at just shy of two hours and spread over two discs, Hope Was softly plucked guitar balladry with huge walls of ethereal synthesized drones to create something that's closer to a shoegaze version of The Cure than anything more in keeping with the world of dark ambient and the strange style works. The church-like reverb to the vocals give a sense of detached melancholy fitting of the subject matter (preoccupied with lost love, suicide and feelings of isolation). The length of the album is both a curse and a blessing, though. A great deal of the songs sound quite similar and a few of the longer tracks get grating (which also has the consequence of making some of the shorter tracks, specifically the four that run less than three minutes, feeling unfinished and lacking), but the nine minute closer "Forget it. I Give Up. Goodbye. I Love You." is one of the best songs about love and loss written in the past few decades and is worth the price of admission alone. Some of the entirely electronic tracks, like "Unsleep", are also spectacularly beautiful and show a profound early era Aphex Twin influence.
Also worth mentioning is Plaster's latest project, the much more upbeat but no less wonderfully strange Mr. Meeble. They're one of the most exciting groups out there these days, with a very funky trip-hop sound and subtle, effective use of autotune and vocoders (something modern pop music lacks).
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