Listening to John Keenan’s “Wreckage of the Past” feels like being handed the audio diary of a ghost who is not yet dead. This is an 18-song excavation of a psyche at war, made all the more intense by the knowledge that Keenan is the sole architect—producer, writer, mixer, and tormented protagonist. The whole project has the hermetically sealed, slightly feverish quality of a man locked in a room, arguing with his own reflection.
The sonic whiplash is immediate and telling. We are plunged into the desperate, circling anxiety of “Afraid to Try,” a mind so “stuck” it’s practically audible. Then, just as you acclimate to the darkness of “Justin One,” where “the grief is creeping back in,” the whole mood shatters. In comes the chest-puffed, sun-drenched bravado of “Gettin Hella Bchez.” The transition is so jarring it leaves behind a strange, charged atmosphere, like the air after a lightning strike. This isn’t a flaw; it is the entire point. The over-the-top swagger is a flimsy, panicked armor welded over the wound.
Keenan’s production mirrors this duality with fascinating results. Smooth, impossibly cool funk basslines and shimmering jazz chords provide the soundtrack for lyrics that confess deep-seated toxicity and an inability to change. There’s a cinematic swell of orchestral strings that elevates this very personal, messy conflict into something almost epic, a kind of internal opera playing out in a Phoenix bedroom. He’s building monuments to his own internal contradictions.
You emerge from the album not with answers, but with a profound sense of the turmoil. You’ve witnessed the pain and the coping mechanism in equal, exhausting measure. It leaves you with a lingering question: is this the sound of a demolition, or are we witnessing the brutal, messy process of a new foundation being laid?
