Mike Dayton’s album Men and Microbes came out in mid-January, back when the “and” was more arithmetic than apocalyptic. It’s 11 tracks of variously electronic activities, from the shivering miasma of “Never feel clean” to the slow instrumental pop of “What’s a king to a single celled organism,” from the latter-day new wave of “A Delicate Balance” to the vocaloid stylings of “More them than us.” Throughout, there’s a sense of solitude to each song. No matter the relative complexity, no matter how many striations of tracks are evident in the final mix, there’s the sense of a single hand behind the wheel, at times almost giddy at the freedom (check out the chiptune funk of “Keep calm, its out of your hands”), at others deeply haunted (the album opens with a three-minute horror show titled “We were here first”). But of course Dayton isn’t alone. The “we” in that first track isn’t merely plural; it’s the microbes with whom we mere humans share the album’s title.
Album originally posted at mikedayton.bandcamp.com. More from Dayton, who is based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at soundcloud.com/mikejdayton.