Millie + Faust = A Nihilist Paradise – Millie Sievert and Faust Jones (reviewed by Dave Franklin)

I guess it was bound to happen. Millie Sievert and Faust Jones get together both as partners in chaotic and creative crime, as allies in anarchy, as musical mischief-makers, and perhaps more. After all, Jones is the all-too-rock and rolls front man with eNuminous & Archimedes, the time-traveling band responsible for Millie Sievert being wrenched from her own timeline and dragged kicking and screaming into the present age. And so, with such a shared experience so prominent in their lives, such a time-hopping backstory, and such a fluid place in the accepted linear chronology, it would be almost unbelievable, to to mention creatively unthinkable that they wouldn’t recognize each other as kindred spirits and form a united front.

If you think that Sievert and Jones might sound like a firm of mid-west lawyers, nothing could be further from the truth and the result of the Edwardian band leader of the Radioactive Five pooling sonic resources with the eNuminous & Archimedes main man is this marvelous album. The quite exotically named Millie + Faust = A Nihilist Paradise is the sound of the former artist settling into the era she now calls home and the latter finding a muse.

Kicking off with a gothic/nu-metal salvo in the form of “Where Are You Now, Lost Poet of the Night,” making for a brilliant opening gambit, it is when you get to the next track, “Brilburne’s Awakening (Beneath The Crescent Skies Of Endless Night)” that you realize that, even though the music has become, perhaps, more accessible, the lyrical depth that has long colored both artists is still in place. (For more about Brilburne, check out Millie Sievert and the Radioactive Five’s previous album, Where Are You, Brilburne Logue?)

There is a darkness and an industrial vibe that runs through this album. Having listened to a great wealth of eNuminous & Archimedes music and everything that Millie and her sonic posse have put out, I can say that, based on what has gone before, this dark and delicious edge appears to be more than the sum of its parts. This is a sound that neither has been particularly prone to in the past. I guess they just bring the darker and more shaded moods and musical mores out of each other.

“Time’s Fissure (Through Rifts Where Hours Falter)” is harsh and angular, raw and raucous. In this AI-augmented musical world that they inhabit, it feels as if the CPU of an automated car plant has taken control of the process and forged music from the sound of steam hammer grooves and production line rhythms.

“The Ghost Of February 30th, 1912 (In Threads Of Time Where Magic Bends)” takes us back to those world-bending events that brought these two souls together, the music a blend of the past and present, a collision of a genteel music hall vibe and a diabolical sonic rite, between pop and rock, between fact and fiction, science and mystique. Opposites attracting to create the new.

And so it goes, a blend of what was and what might be, the past and the present unexpectedly bound together to create the future, or at least one possible version of it.

Millie Sievert and Faust Jones are a sonic Bonnie and Clyde, the Sid, and Nancy of the current age, star-crossed lovers who have found a way to be together…but for how long? Like all such pairings, their time together may be short and sweet, but imagine the music, not to mention the trail of destruction they are likely to leave in their wake. If it is better to burn out than fade away, welcome to ground zero of the most significant creative explosion since the Big Bang!