Mike Mills, the lyricist/vocalist/multi-instrumentalist behind Toehider, remains one of my favorite musical discoveries of the last decade, and having been a dutiful follower of his Patreon since its inception, I’ve had the pleasure of watching along as his last couple albums (this one and 2020’s “I Like It!”) slowly came into being. Born of a desire to create a sci-fi space opera a la Arjen Lucassen (with a hefty dose of Jim Steinman-style song titling), “I Have Little to no Memory of These Memories” is a single, 47-minute track that spans a myriad of musical styles and tells a cohesive, if rather outlandish, story about memory, trauma, and shoebill storks. And it’s really good.
The album opens with an a capella introduction in Have You Forgotten More than You’ve Remembered? similar to the opener of 2017’s “Good” album before swinging into a chaotic overture that introduces a few of the main musical themes of the album. The introduction manages to be an earworm despite its rather sesquipedalian lyrics — a common theme for the album and Toehider music in general — and promises an interesting tale about two individuals (the third declined to be part of the story) who find themselves with strange memories in their minds. The instrumental overture is equal parts Mike Oldfield and Dream Theater, and the folky I Don’t Remember This follows, introducing us to one of our main characters, a fireman with a painfully eidetic memory.
The tune hearkens back to the 2014’s fantastic Meet the Sloth, with lots of delightful bouzouki flourishes, and borrows some melodies from a favorite unreleased Toehider song of mine from 2018 called My Eventual Undoing. This is one of the quieter moments of the first half of the album, and shows Mills’ impressive acoustic prowess as well as his sublime vocal harmonies. Our fireman protagonist laments the intrusion of these foreign memories before heading off to answer a call from our other hero, known only as “The Hoarder”. Her portion of the album was one of the first chunks of the song that Mills released on his Patreon way back in 2018, and is one of my absolute favorite parts of the album.
The abrupt shift from lilting acoustics to the frantic, riff-laden depiction of the Hoarder’s home going up in flames perfectly evokes the character’s panic and anxiety, and Mills’ insane vocal range is on full display. The whole section just grooves and is driven forward by electric guitar licks and ’80s cartoon-style synths, and I must admit I love the small reference to the Toehider Patreon’s initial goal of “49 songs you must hear before you die” at the song’s end. This bit ends with a thoroughly dramatic depiction of the shoebill stork’s arrival on the scene, complete with a synthesized orchestra and backing choir, followed by a sizeable break in the music as the story changes perspectives to that of an alien, creatively named … Bralien.
Bralien Messes Up is a slow, heavy rocker with some beefy, distorted electric guitar and a David Gilmour-esque solo in the back half. This section depicts our final main character being tasked with preserving his people’s memory indefinitely, a task which he’s unable to perform without the help of the “feeble Earth brains” he decides to offload some of his people’s storage into. The chunkiness and relatively slow pace of the tune help add some great musical diversity before we return to Earth to see the Fireman and the Hoarder meeting and discussing their shared predicament.
The Meeting starts with a guitar-and-synth tune that feels a bit like the ending credits of an episode of Transformers before shifting gears into a fast-paced arena rocker with a jumpy bass line and some really fun vocal lines. Mills’ ability to sing back and forth to himself really goes a long way to make the listener forget that all of this was made by one person, and the stacked harmonies behind the choruses remind one of Freddie Mercury or Rush’s “chorus of Geddys” — though dare I say with even more range than the former and far better tone than the latter. This section caps off with the excellent instrumental Rocket Boat Montage which is precisely what it sounds like, replete with ’80s musical references all over the place, some portions that for whatever reason really remind me of StarCraft, and a perfect “high-fiving in the sunset” fade-out to close.
Next is probably my favorite part of the album, Memories are Malleable, a straight-forward rocker with some fantastic vocal fry, fun spoken lines, and an incredibly singable chorus. The repeated guitar riff is catchy as hell, and the intercutting between the humans and the aliens is demonstrated in a really fun way as the song charges to a slow, bombastic close. A Mind to Be Made Up is a very Haken-style tune with some excellent djenty-polyrhythms layered over by some syncopated vocals in the midst of some quieter, spacey sound effects.
The CD and streaming versions of the album then follow with the “good ending”, wherein our heroes realize the aliens are in fact extremely small and the problem gets solved with a simple USB flash drive — a very funny solution to a strange predicament — and our heroes fly home carefree. The first portion of the good ending retains the spacey quietness of the previous segment, while the ending is a very ’80s synth rock number that hearkens back to the theme from The Hoarder before bringing back the Have You Forgotten melody at the very end.
The “bad ending,” present only on the vinyl edition of the album, is a much darker, more chaotic power metal tune (lifted practically note-for-note from another unreleased Patreon tune, Overall Oval), wherein it’s revealed that the shoebill stork was actually in cahoots with the aliens (somehow) and sold the humans off to them before leaving them to die. A bummer? Sure. But an absolute banger of a bummer for fans of extremely inscrutable power metal.
“I Have Little to no Memory of These Memories” is far from an easy listen. It demands the listener’s attention for basically its entire duration, and doesn’t let up for pretty much its whole 47-minute runtime. As such, I can’t say that I think this album is for absolutely everyone. But, like many of my other favorite concept albums, if you give it the attention it deserves, it’s an extremely rewarding experience. Back in 2016, I said that I thought “The Similitude of a Dream” was the album Neal Morse had been trying to make his whole life, and I think “Memory” is perhaps the album Mike Mills has been waiting for, as well. It serves as a perfect confluence of his musical, vocal, and lyrical talents — and special shoutout to Andrew Saltmarsh’s fantastic cover and booklet art — and represents basically everything that I love about his music.
I like it. It’s good.
1oz Perception, 1lb Obscure 