There is a peculiar kind of engine at the heart of “Half Evil” by Tomato Soup, and it runs not on gasoline but on disorientation. The Denver six-piece calls their sound “Motor-Folk,” and it fits. The track has the chugging, forward-moving momentum of a vehicle, yet it seems to be driving through a landscape seen in a fever dream, where the signposts are all written in an alien, albeit familiar, alphabet.
Here, a crisis of faith is catalogued with the desperate precision of an academic trying to footnote their own nervous breakdown. The lyrics wrestle with “atheologies” and “comparative religion architecture,” trying to intellectually scaffold a self that is spiritually crumbling. This isn’t the wail of a lost soul; it’s the meticulously penned dissertation of one. Listening feels like finding a perfectly preserved insect in amber, an ancient confusion trapped in modern clarity. For a moment, it reminded me of the specific, slightly sweet smell of old library books—that scent of contained knowledge offering zero practical comfort for the heart.
This state is brilliantly captured in the self-coined phrase “Holy Saturday Cryptomeasia,” a kind of hidden amnesia in the waiting room between what was and what might be. It’s the sound of being a stranger in your own skin, a tourist in your own life. The combined work of Alec Doniger, Adam Cabrera, Ronan Dowling, Riley Merino, Colin Sheehan, and Megan Ellsworth creates a hypnotic, circling current that pulls you into this limbo, making the plea to “find a way back” feel profoundly urgent and deeply ambiguous.
It leaves you with the quiet, unsettling hum of a machine left running in an empty room. After the track ends, you’re left wondering: is there truly a way back, or is the destination just learning how to live inside the maze?
