Tweaker, aka Chris Vrenna – former Nine Inch Nails drummer/programmer, a Grammy award winner and general sonic ironmonger – is back with a follow up to the lavishly praised debut, The Attraction to All Things Uncertain. And what’s more, all the usual Tweaker suspects are back in tow with him: David Sylvian on the trippy, disturbed beats of ‘Pure Genius’ and Will Oldham on the beutifully delivered and double-edged ‘Ruby’. This time round though, Vrenna has also brought in such darkly phlegmatic characters as Robert Smith of The Cure, Johnny Marr of The Smiths, Howard Leithauser of upcoming New York obscurists, The Walkmen plus the eternally groaning, moaning dishevelled she-devil, Jennifer Charles of the Elysian Fields (and Dan Namakura’s Loveage project, more significantly).
Inspired by a prolonged bout of insomnia experienced by Vrenna’s wife, Chris asked each guest on the album to contribute facets of their own nocturnal consciousness to the album: what kept them awake at night, what did they dream about? And unlike most of most, they didn’t come up with anything remotely like finding yourself at the office without your trousers on, or being James Bond quite surprisingly. So again, it’s a bit of a concept album. But where ‘The Attraction of All Things Uncertain’ traced the emotional discovery of one central character, ‘2 AM Wake Up Call’ provides an unsettling hall of mirrors, a more necessarily fractured deal, and a more disparate range of voices. Robert Smith provides a touch of the paranoid and neurotic, Mellowdrone provides the laconic and the scornful, Hamilton Leithauser – the exhuberant and uninhibited and Jennifer Charles, the erotic.
As you can well imagine, it’s an intense listen – but never is it a testing one. No track is overstretched, no track underdeveloped. And as haunting as it is, there’s still the occasional sign of joy. Much like any restless evening spent in bed, for that matter. Only this time there’s no two-hundred and fifty trips to the toilet to contend with. And that’s a bonus for anybody’s bladder.