ometimes you need to be in the right state to access an album. Don’t listen to Kid A with the convertible top down on a summer’s day. Don’t pump vintage Mouse on Mars through the tinny speakers of Grandma’s funeral. Similarly, you might not want to listen to Bleeding Light unless you are in a dark spot emotionally and physically. If you feel sunny, you won’t identify with Jon DeRosa’s dour emo-leaning lyrics. If the weather feels sunny and you’re active, the dolorous drones that sleep on the album will frustrate you.

But I’m pinned to the bed with a mangled ankle, and my life has been collapsing into predictable dramatics lately, so Bleeding Light works for me. The opener “Depression Modern” sets the tone. The world’s saddest synthesized organist numbly plods the same fuzzy note for a minute. A Doppler-effect electro-violin slides in, mimicked by a quiet tenor sax. Static and feedback crackle—unexciting tips of the hat to shoegaze and glitch. Finally DeRosa and a mumbling backing vocalist somberly moan about some vague loss.

The above description sounds disparaging—likely because through much of the album I simply didn’t sense the emotional honesty behind the extreme gloom of the record. But I was dark myself, so the song covered me like a blanket. It pinned me to the ground and poured chicken soup in my ears. Part of me resented the feeling that I was being soothed by a sad aesthetic—artifice rather than a real emotion.

The words of a newly hired professional moper. It doesn’t matter if Aarktica’s sadness is “authentic” or not. How can I judge that? I can’t indict on intuition. Here is the only criteria that matters: once they made their artistic choice to convey a certain mood, do they convey it well? Aarktica does, for the most part. The guitar lines are adequately elongated and dreary, drifting into Windy and Carl territory until an elegant, finger-picked melody saves the band from copycatting. Down-on-their-luck sidewalk saxophones flare like cigarettes in the night. And the steady drumming of Mike Pride (complemented by the skittering beat programming of Aaron Spectre) prevents the songs from lapsing into total malaise.

When Aarktica decides to be emotionally dynamic, they succeed wonderfully. The centerpiece of the album, “A Shadow Knife (Draws the Bleeding Light),” starts off normally. Another trip down Downer Drive. But halfway through the track, the sax stirs itself. Then positively hopeful. The beats get more energetic until the song emerges from its despondence into the (still somewhat gray) light of day. This song, like many, benefits from a lack of lyrics. Aarktica was never a lyrics band. Their strength is ambience. The lyrics pin the songs down. When he sings, DeRosa simply cannot escape banal dreariness.

This comes to a head on “A Wash a Sea Goodbye It’s Me.” Emo guitars crunch, a sax wails blandly, and you can almost see the drummer having a catharsis while DeRosa repeats “Goodbye” monotonously. Shudder.

Despite my complaining, I do have a soft spot for the clever and complex drone-pop that Aarktica attempts. It is a bold synthesis—marrying two genres with completely different dynamics. I suppose it could only work if the mood was slow and sad. Could you imagine a twee drone-pop album?