According to his Bandcamp discography, Levi J. Miller has some thirty-eight releases available to listen to. That’s not counting his twenty-eight other releases on his secondary page or his projects where he is collaborating with other musicians. We’ve been over this before. The TLDR of it all; Levi J. Miller has a great deal of output.
Quantity doesn’t always equal quality but there’s almost always a particular spin or theme to each release. Maybe it’s Garage Rock or maybe it’s Something Darker or maybe it’s 77-minute concept album about how the Internet can make us feel like gods.
With God Complex, Levi J. Miller swings for the fences with an incredibly ambitious concept album spanning 33-tracks that follows the tale of an imagined protagonist that gets Internet Famous through his online art and starts a cult to feed his (or her) ego. Without much introspection, it’s likely a feeling we can all relate to thanks to the serotonin uptick that comes with Likes, Subscribes, Follows and Comments coming in through our own personal Internet Portals.
Admirable concepts aside, the music itself within this opus is an, overall, enjoyable listen. Seventy-seven minutes is quite a commitment for our attention addled brains but Miller has obviously done his best to keep things moving along and sonically interesting with plenty of interesting guitar sounds, different vocal styles and memorable lyrics. It is, by and large, a Rock record but tracks like “A Nonverbal Prayer” or “Confusionism” slow things down from a manic pace into ambient and gentle zones (respectively).
The album closes with a heavily vocoded trip into space called “Thx 4 Listening” – in which our protagonist presumably ascends beyond this mortal coil into pure Light and Technology, a fate we’re all headed for whether we like it or not. Levi J. Miller is just showing us the way.