On his third outing, "Do You Feel Much Better?" The Missingman vaults straight into the creepy basement of scrutiny and paranoia, and yet manages to make it sound exhilarating. The track envelopes the listener in a lo-fi haze, with its edges offset by kinetic energy that presses every beat forward.
You can feel it from the start, an implied surveillance that reflects the song's theme. It's not just a song, it's a mood, an approximation of what it feels like to be watched endlessly, not just watched but madly judged and begin at the edges to sour under all those invisible eyes. But instead of dragging the listener down into their anxiety, the song leverages that feeling toward a charged atmosphere in which every instrumental flourish, vocal texture, or backtracked gulp augments its restless hypnagogia.
There's an urgency in here that is hard not to pay attention to. The lo-fi production imparts an intimate, at times conspiratorial, feel that you just suddenly stumbled upon the artist mid-thought. Layers of understated sound engage with throbbing rhythms in a dynamic tug-of-war that keeps you suspended between unease and exultation.
"Do You Feel Much Better?" Displays The Missingman's ability to pull introspective, almost soft themes into music that feels both immersive and kinetic. It's a rich addition to his expanding catalog, and it proves that paranoia, at least when channeled with such grotesque creativity, can be as contagious as it is unnerving.
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