Listening to Shadow Person’s new album, “Chronic Disappointment”, feels like staring into one of those fun-house mirrors, only to realize with a slow, creeping dread that the glass isn’t distorted at all. This is the new normal, a warped reality we’ve simply adjusted to. The project, the thoughtful and unnerving musical identity of Will Chatham, doesn’t just hold this mirror up to the world; it turns it inward, exploring the hairline fractures that form on our own reflections when the world outside stops making sense.
The diagnosis begins with “I Swear Its Not cake,” a song that perfectly skewers the shimmering emptiness of our digital age. It taps into that bizarre, fleeting internet trend of objects that look like one thing but are, in fact, cake. Chatham uses this as a devastatingly simple metaphor for a culture built on surfaces. He sings of “filtered faces” and “scripted proposals,” and you can almost feel the phantom taste of fondant and food coloring on your tongue—a sweetness with no nutritional value. It’s a sardonic, groovy dissection of things that look appealing but “won’t break” when you try to slice into them, because there’s nothing substantial underneath.
From there, the album pivots from the grand cultural stage to the lonely, flickering bulb of the individual mind. On tracks like “A Walk With Reason” and “The Blue Train,” the external noise fades into an internal hum of existential static. The latter captures a modern ennui so potent you can almost smell the stale air of a commuter train heading nowhere you want to go. It’s the quiet desperation of questioning your own life, not with a bang, but with the weary sigh of someone asking, “what it means anymore to be a modern man.”
Then there are moments where the satire bites with absurdly sharp teeth. “Captain Picardy” is a shambling, chaotic march led by a commander who can’t see that all his troops have deserted. It’s less a Star Trek episode and more the sound of a CEO trying to parallel park a cruise ship in a swimming pool, blissfully unaware of the screeching metal and splintering fiberglass. This same acidic wit fuels “Ideas For Einstein,” a brilliant caricature of the terminally online armchair genius, a person whose confidence is inverse to their knowledge. It’s a necessary jab at an era that mistakes a loud opinion for a valid one.
But the true, beating heart of “Chronic Disappointment” is when it peels away the satire to reveal the scar tissue beneath. “Actual Bruh” is stunningly direct, an open-letter to a brother, recounting childhood torments not with abstract poetry but with the stark clarity of a long-overdue conversation. It’s uncomfortable, intimate, and profoundly moving. This raw vulnerability implodes on the experimental track “TimeFuck,” which feels like a panic attack in grammatical form. A cascade of adverbs—”irregularly,” “chaotically,” “fragmentarily”—sonically represents the complete breakdown of a linear self, the psychic fallout from a life of pretense and unresolved pain.
It all culminates in the album’s chilling thesis statement, “Biggus Lickus.” After navigating the fake cakes, the performing clowns (“Canned Laughter”), and the internal chaos, the final verdict is delivered: “the product is us.” The album posits that in this vast, shimmering, superficial marketplace, our identities have become the ultimate commodity. The final line hangs in the air long after the music stops, a simple, terrifying question: “are we for sale?”
“Chronic Disappointment” doesn’t offer a map out of the fun-house. It just hands you a shard of the broken mirror and asks if you recognize the person staring back.
