…All Night is a grotesque perversion of late-90s retro-lounge culture and intensity of post-dot com social networking. In bold on the album cover like an emblem of the nine to five cubical apocalypse, a sky scraper menaces the night world of the music-hair-clothes-dance crowd. The politics of Saturna resounds with defeatism to a consumer culture so vast and complete that it cannot be fully referenced. The album tries to escape a world of malls and town homes (like any confused twenty-something) but the journey is an illusion and Saturna never leaves the vacant sidewalks of downtown Portland.
The music continues into the future—like a 90s New Order album—promising to bring you along, but inevitably leaving the listener stuck with a mysteriously unimpressive present, without drugs or a bank account. Perpetually empty of lyrical meaning or references to happier eras of pop music, …All Night becomes vacuous in that epic way only Western America can justify. Vast minimalist exterior spaces and sparse neo-minimalist interiors of hash red lighting and harsh rectilinear surfaces dominate an aesthetic left to Marxist speculators and professional baby-boomer-parasites.
What could this world be that we have created, with so much emptiness and so many bright colors? The only way to answer is to enjoy a few mores years under the electric night sky of your youth-enclave, before you retreat the harsh realities of exurban mortgages, childcare, and pop-punk. Listen to this record and dread the future without enjoying the present. To make an EP so flat and relentless with the painless unease of contemporary America is an accomplishment matched only by the anesthetic space rockers Voyager One. It is shoegaze without blues and electronica without fun sex. Puritanical voices sing songs about chasing the empty night.