Everywhere At The End Of Time: A Lengthy Review

Many people refer to this album as the “Dementia Album”, or even “The Darkest Album Ever Made” and if you had asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said the exact same thing, glazing this album and considering it the greatest piece of media ever conceived by a human being. I still do consider it, five or so years after it has run its course through the virality on the internet and its insurmountable fan projects, of which I have contributed to some, that it is one of the best projects created. Conceived as the final exploration by English artist James Leyland Kirby, under the moniker of The Caretaker, it explores the deterioration of the mind from degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

In early 2020, during which the pandemic had hit and left me somewhat isolated, I was casually scrolling through YouTube videos to watch and stumbled upon a video about The Caretaker’s final work, which you are reading a review of today. I was curious and went to TikTok to see what people were saying about it, trusting a site of people who are regular joes rather than people with corporate reputations. People were recalling it being a dark and scary album that will break you down and make you start forgetting things, and my ears perked up at it. I looked for the video of it as it was not on Spotify, and I listened to the first stage. Of which I got scared and then didn’t return to it for nearly 3 months. Upon returning to the album though, I decided to fully sit down and listen to it. It was safe to say that I was hooked. My brain had been altered and I wasn’t the same person going in as I was coming out.

Earlier works play into this project, spanning from his earliest works, which were inspired by The Shining, on Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom to outtakes on the true final album titled Everywhere, An Empty Bliss, which released the same day as the full YouTube upload. This journey brings into a time element as well, with each album in the series released 6 months apart from each other. This is an important fact, because many within the community for this artist have debated whether it is correct to listen to it in segments per stage, to give off the feeling of visiting an elderly grandparent, or all at once to experience the slow and gradual descent into madness. For this review as an overarching feeling towards this album that has shaped my personal taste in music, I will be listening to it all at once without stopping. The review will go over each stage individually, calling back to places when necessary, and not explaining every single sample.

Stage 1: The Beginning of The Fall

Much of this stage is presented in a way that soothes the listener, gives them a sense of tranquility, while static and popping of vinyl dust plays to give off a not fully safe feeling. Think of being in a hall with your loved one sharing stories and catching up with each other, knowing full well that they are not going to be around for much longer. “It’s Just A Burning Memory”, the first thing you hear from this, is a sample of a standard known as Heartaches, performed by Al Bowlly. Several other versions of this tune will pop up throughout the album. We receive a small bit of confusion around A5, known as Slightly Bewildered. We have a brief sample of a voice, that loops at the very end, catching one’s attention for its out of place nature. A6 presents a sense of space in between thoughts, something that will come up often very soon. A small detour into B3, if you are listening to the full YouTube upload, there was a rendering error on Kirby’s part, which replaced the proper Quiet Internal Rebellions, with a later stage’s track E8, known as “Long Term Dusk Glimpses”. The original, streaming and Bandcamp alike, is a look into some darker thoughts of the subject, feeling a mild sense of anxiety but they cannot figure out why. The fuzziness picks up on side B as well, not letting up until B6 or “My Heart Will Stop In Joy.” This stage is full of reverberated oldies with static and fuzz built around, resembling an aging mind rather than a troubled one.

Stage 2: A Depression Most Denied

Unlike the earlier stage, plenty of this one is somber and bleak. Instead of a lot of oldies, a significant portion of the album is made of classical pieces, specifically The Grand Canyon Suite. Three of its four movements feature some of the most heartbreakingly beautiful songs on this entire first half of the project. C4, D1, and D5 include this piece, with my personal favorite of the trio being D5’s “The Way Ahead Feels Lonely” which sonically sounds of being completely defeated, unable to accept but unable to deny that something is very, very wrong with yourself. In a similar fashion, C5’s “Surrendering To Despair” is my favorite on the entire project, pulling together a feeling that can only be matched by Everywhere, An Empty Bliss’s “And Bliss Everywhere Bliss”, which is rumored to have been an alternative ending to the project, instead of the terminal lucidity we receive now (more on that later). C3’s “What Does it Matter How My Heart Breaks” is the Seger Ellis rendition of Heartaches, and this version will be the prominent figure throughout the rest of the project, save for the small blips of it Post-Awareness. Along with a bleak disposition, the scene depicted is of a shyer and more unwilling to speak person, trapped in a blind depression. Stage 2 is where we fully start seeing the pieces forming together that something is going wrong, and it cracks open as soon as the final note hits your ears.

Stage 3: The Meltdown of a Calmer Mind

Immediately after you are flung into a depression, the whiplash of E1’s “Back There Benjamin” flies you into a state of haunted confusion, sampling “Goodnight My Beautiful” by Russ Morgan. Russ will be featured constantly, and has already been featured in Stage 1, with tracks such as “Room With A View” being B6 and “Moonlight and Shadows” being A4. We will see another one of these tracks from the same album, The Uncollected Russ Morgan and His Orchestra, 1937-1938. Coming back to the record at hand, however, we will begin to see the cracks of many seep through. With the first few tracks, we begin flip-flopping between long and short. E3 and E5, named “Hidden Sea Buried Deep” and “To The Minimal Great Hidden” respectively, are short but get the point across; using short sample loops to contract fading memories into one’s mind. E6, “Sublime Beyond Loss” is an attempt to tell a story, but with such quickly deteriorating coherency, it is almost impossible to get a full grasp on what exactly is being said. E7 has been linked to Childhood memories, the biggest clue has been in the title and an alternative take of the song “Bewildered in Other Eyes” and “All Eyes Bewildered”, both using “The Prettiest Song of All”. While a good majority of the earlier tracks are found throughout the next 3 stages, the main assortment of sounds comes from this stage. It would make sense, these being the final memories that are seen before everything has fallen to bits. The F Side starts off with a blissful and beautiful 92 seconds of love and life returning to normal, before being brought back into despair, with a recall from C2’s “Misplaced in Time” known as F2, or “Drifting Time Misplaced”. F3 is a haunting, chilling track that pulls the listener deeper into the depths of what is to come. F4, F5 and F8 all come from the recollections of C3, but at varying levels of deterioration. This symbolizes the final few coherent memories that could possibly keep themselves alive with the rapid grey matter approaching. F7 or “Libet Delay” is an altered version of “Libet’s Delay” from An Empty Bliss Beyond This World. This feeling of twisting and turning disorients the listener and compels them to feel the same way one would with a disease that is rapidly approaching death.

Stage 4: Medically Prescribed Chaos

We lose our sense of poetic titles, given each track of stage 4 becoming 20 minutes in length and taking up whole sides of a vinyl record reaching a staggering 87 minutes. For this stage, I will refer to each one as its side rather than its name, as it is all the same one except for I1, “Temporary Bliss State”. G1 flings the listener directly into chaos, as opposed to easing them into it. The flying around of different melodies is hard to make out, with four or five notes being coherent every 10 or 15 seconds. It is here where we begin what is known as Post-Awareness; the motion of the patient or subject being fully aware that they are losing their memory, as it unravels faster and faster, before leaving them into a catatonic state of numb. Each layer of the mixture throughout comes and goes, spinning in the ears of the listener, splitting many of the long tracks into shorter sections, which was the easiest way of talking about these post awareness stages. The first part fills in a lot of the madness, and slowly gives into Heartaches on top around the 8-minute mark. H1 is the most structured of the 4 tracks, using reversed samples of Goodnight My Beautiful to create a vertigo for the listener, popping in and out of each ear until another section slowly creeps upwards to assist the confusion. In a cyclical formation, we see the first layer pop up after a while, fading back in and out with time’s march forward, before completely stopping for a single place, the quote-unquote “Hell Sirens”. These sirens, sampling “Granada” by Mantovani, are meant to resemble the PTSD of world wars, the bomb sirens that would blare whilst being underneath. It grades on you as its time-stretched blare fills your ears to the brim. Yet afterwards, it is like the comfort of a loved one soothing you into a slumber, trying to calm you so that the world comes back to the present. With this ability, it fades into I1, which has not much to write about. Its simple song rapidly fills you just as the hell sirens had. It splits your head in half and fills it with the most beautiful childhood memories, as it is all you can think about anymore. Just as quickly as it came, it rushes you into despair once more. J1’s sound can be identified with a simple word: Heartbreaking. Its shifting sound is not like the others; it has the somber tone of Stage 2 with a trumpet giving you the deep learning of your true state of mind, which leads to become an incomprehensible mess. Its last 8 minutes feel like quiet acceptance of the state of mind. From bombastic and heralding life to the loneliness a grandparent will feel during their final days, Stage 4’s presence alone in this project is enough to make listeners cry for help that they will never receive.

Stage 5: Clear Acceptance of Death to All Healthy Matter

While the controlled feeling of Stage 4 had many turn the whole thing off, Stage 5 acts as a kill screen for most of the first-time listeners of this project. The rapid, shifting vocal samples begin and it’s almost impossible to keep up with any melody whatsoever. Moreover, many of the breaking points happen in the first few minutes of K1, known as “Advanced Plaque Entanglements”. The first few clarity states feature the first time we hear a fully clear sample of something in hours at this point. After the first one, there is a small little hole in the cacophony that appears, adding into some last-minute spikes in brain activity. We see an old person unable to even eat without aid, unable to dress, unable to use the restroom, having to be bedridden with a pan underneath them. Yet the persistence of the body lingers on, as it still has all its functions chugging away to propel the mind encased as it falls into death. The memories of a solo appear near the end of K1, as it is buried underneath everything else going on. L1’s horrors appear once more, bringing back the PTSD of the earlier album. Scratching and skipping and repeating over and over until you can’t hear even your own thoughts. It’s impossible to even put into words the amount of pain and anguish that the subject of the album appears to be going through, but just as quickly as everything else, it recedes. M1 and N1 both foreshadow the final stage of this project, not being chaotic like the first 2 sides but not as quiet as the last stage of this entire album. We see blips of activity but nothing that you can make out with a simple listen. People have created different layers to find the samples of this space more than any other place. Its middleman, transitioning construction has quarreled plenty of people and leaves the listener waiting for the end of it all. Stage 5 overall is the final battle and collapse of anything left, the only thing the disease must go after now is the vital bodily functions. It is Waterloo.

Stage 6: Numbness, Revelation, and The End Of It All

The subject is now completely unable to speak, unable to think, and unable to want. There is nothing left for them to do because the world disappears as soon as they turn their head and field of view. The intense ambience of O1 “A Confusion So Thick You Forget Forgetting” is made up of F3 for the most part, not letting up once, or at least that is what it feels like. This huge, overbearing sound cannot be found anywhere else on the project. P1’s “A Brutal Bliss Beyond This Empty Defeat” lifts a little more activity, but with the violent reduction of speed, there is very little to find melodic until the later half of the side. It wants to bring you back to an earlier time, but the only thing it can recover is all of the terrible moments of you fighting to stay. The inability to find peace in a mind that barely keeps. All activity is reduced to a single note in the dark matter world. Q1 “Long Decline Is Over” continues this final fleeting sound, picking up activity as well as dust and scratches. The space discussed earlier is now everywhere. The crackling resembles footsteps, the distortion resembles the buzz of hospital lights, and the brief feelings resembles the talking of nurses, loved ones, and regular people walking around. That activity falls into two-faced anguish, shifting between peace and violence repeatedly. R1’s “Place Where The World Fades Away”, like “It’s Just A Burning Memory” is the most popular one, for the soul reason of the final few minutes. However, there is a whole other section in front of it, a slumber before being lifted awake; waking to complete clarity, in the hospital bed somewhere alone, and hearing the angels from above in complete revelation and warmth. They beckon you to come forth, wanting you to reunite with all the people you had left behind to pursue life. This swell of a choir is preceded by the sounds of coughing, high-pitched ringing, and closing doors. A welcoming of moving to the next life, wherever that may be. The choir pains as it continues to sing, clipping at the top as you ascend into the sky above, leaving the aged body for the nurses in the morning to bury, surrounded by your friends, family, and their comrades. A minute of silence at the end for you awaits, letting you look back down and smile. You did all that you could, and while the troubles occurred throughout, it is finally time to move to the kingdom.


For all that has been said, it took me years to fully understand what this marathon had to offer. It took me consideration, deep diving into the project itself, and listening to it many times to finally get why it is so powerful to begin with. It isn’t the video essays, it isn’t the people who listen once with a camera on their face, and it isn’t the people who use the few songs of it to make scary analogue horror. It is a deep understanding of how music plays into our perception of the past, 20 years of experimenting in sampling and creating soundscapes. It is a careful researching of how these fatal diseases work. It is about being able to do all of it without becoming cliché and tacky. It is having those experiences that we will someday lose forever.