The I Found A Monster by Seth Schaeffer does not begin, it breaks out. The initial note seems like lightning striking a silent air, getting you right into a dark, filmic, and emotional world. You can tell the narrator in him - the filmmaker, the composer, the human being who has lived through something and emerged on the other side holding fire in his hands. Any sound in this first song is deliberate, as though he is soundtracking the moment he no longer needed to run away from himself.
The heartbeat of it is his voice. It rattles, and flies, and hurts, and it is as much as it is strong as it is weak, with that combination of power and delicacy which truth alone can give. You can feel the burden of his narrative - the terror, the rebellion, the liberation. His delivery has a rawness that makes you put whatever you are doing on hold. It is the noise of a person facing the aspects of themselves they have attempted to suppress and it is impossible not to feel it as well. It is not that his voice sings, but confesses.
The creation is like a living breathing creature - magnificent, corporeal and stunningly stratified. The guitar is roaring and moaning like a tempest just under the surface, and the swells of the orchestra are surging and crashing around him. Brass horns are slicing through the darkness like gold rays, and strings go in and out, gleaming with silent suffering. It is the type of setup that might fit a cinema, but it does not lose its intimacy. You can almost taste the shakings in your bones - that just right combination of anarchy and discipline.
The best thing about it, however, is the change it brings about. I Found A Monster is not only about overcoming fear, but also reclaiming it. Of making what used to trouble you your own source of power. It is possible to feel that Schaeffer draws on his influences - the cinematic grandeur of Hans Zimmer, the tense edges of Trent Reznor, but what he produces is all his own place. The song is stretched to proportions bigger than music with the haunting harmonies of Emily Hatch and the spine-chilling trumpet lines. It is sound catharsis, revolt, a confrontation, a discharge.
As soon as the final note dies, the silence is left to vibrate with all the things unsaid. You are there, heart still racing, and you have just touched something real - something human. I Found A Monster is not a song you listen to, but it is a song that listens to you, eliciting something truthful out of you. That is what music is meant to do, to wake you up, shake you, to remind you that you are more than the noise. It is gorgeous, bravura and completely memorable.
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