On Sound & Fury, we’re all along for the ride. Simpson clearly thinks our world is off the rails and not likely to right itself anytime soon. It’s an incomplete assessment to simply link the songs on Sound & Fury to the aforementioned artists since the tracks are more than mere homages to a patchwork quilt of sounds and genres, but the trail to the past is clear and unmistakable. It’s a lot to unpack but worth the effort if one can give it a few listens as the songs gain more nuance after multiple plays. Starting off with a nearly four minute guitar-laden instrumental (“Ronin”), Simpson takes the listener on a hard driving, often cynical tour of what’s wrong with the world today, successfully creating a sonic post apocalyptic kaleidoscope, channeling parts ZZ Top (“Remember to Breathe”, “Sing Along”), electronic dance (“A Good Look”), Arcade Fire (the wonderfully meandering and moody “Make Art Not Friends”), Rob Zombie (“Best Clockmaker on Mars”), 1990s alternative rock (“Mercury in Retrograde”, “All Said and Done”) and even Black Sabbath (“Fastest Horse in Town”), all while dropping breadcrumbs of traditional Japanese musical undertones throughout. In many ways, Sound & Fury would be best suited to be heard at high volume in a car speeding down the highway toward some unknown destination. But with proper openness to different sounds and taken as a body of musical creation rather than a collection of tracks the album works. Sound & Fury isn’t a particularly easy listen in the traditional sense, ultimately proving to sound much better after a few turns than during its initial play. Sound & Fury advances Simpson’s envelope pushing urges several levels, combining sounds many will associate with hard rock acts from decades ago with ample nods to metal and electronica for good measure. On the stellar A Sailor’s Guide to Earth, Simpson dropped the curtain significantly on his love for genre busting, bringing in horn sections, orchestral meanderings on many tracks and even covering a song by Nirvana. Simpson won hordes of fans for unveiling his own revival of outlaw country in 2013 with High Top Mountain and 2014’s Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, both inspired, tight solo efforts which showed flashes of musical contrarianism but stayed tied mainly to its Southern rock and country roots. Sturgill Simpson takes this approach and blows it wide open on his latest solo outing, Sound & Fury, an album that is as much end of days coda as it is a throwback to heyday 1980s rock with its cutting guitars, keyboards and hard driving percussion. The only way to organize timekeeping between all these disparate worlds is metric time, which can be easily corrected for relativistic effects, for instance the 8 billionths of a second difference between a Clarke orbit and Earth's surface.Most artists end up changing lanes creatively at some point in their careers.
Honestly I'm sympathetic to the more radical ideas about time reform because 1) what we got now is some bullshit and 2) Earth traditional timekeeping is utterly incompatible with what Mars has going on and 3) Mars is easy mode, do you really want to try to make Luna/Venus/Ceres/Europa/Mercury/random ass asteroid and moon colonies and interplanetary spacecraft use a timekeeping system that dates to the fucking Sumerians of 4000 BC? We don't use the Sumerian "cubits" and "spans" anymore now do we? Like I'm glad they invented the stick but we have better technology than the stick now.
There's also the idea of getting rid of the rest of the calendar and just using seconds for everything, like if you're 30 years old you're about 1 billion seconds old. For instance some people want to abolish time zones and having everyone using UTC time, but get up and clock in at different UTC times, since obviously forcing half the planet to work in the middle of their local night is ridiculous. This bleeds into time reforms for this planet. "Months" as moons are impossible what with having two of them and the fact they're so close they buzz by so quickly, but arranging the calendar around what constellation you're passing through is fair, though the month-equivalents would be on average twice as long, though due to the less circular orbit of Mars the longest would be like 3 times as long as the shortest. NASA scientists and engineers operating surface rovers are on Martian "sol" time already, so every day they show up to the office 37 minutes later than the next day, which gets inconvenient real fast. Kim Stanley Robinson likes the idea of programming Martian clocks to stop running at midnight for 37 minutes every night. Mad Doc Zubrin has recommended lengthening the time of the Martian second so that 24 Mars hours equals one Mars day, which is possibly the most insane of all ideas.
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