Album Review: Petrol by Anenon

Petrol, the third full-length by Brian Allen Simon (AKA Anenon), is a 40-minute homage to the artist's hometown of Los Angeles. It's concerned with the "beauty of distance," the contrast of LA's urban sprawl and intimate pockets of personal space. These nine freeform meditations brim with emotion and detail, comprising a deeply personal and accomplished album.Real-world sounds and acoustic instruments have been central to Simon's past work, and even more so on Petrol.

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Anenon's Petrol is bookended by the sounds of freeway noise, so you don't have to look very far to find the meaning behind the title. But it's fortuitous that the album, with its viscous, reverberant swirls of reeds and violin, has the same dusky resonance as the color. If this is an album about Anenon's native Los Angeles, the setting is somewhere just past sundown, the sky steadily leeched of color as lines of cars streak toward the horizon like rivers full of embers.

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Petrol, the third full-length from L. A. -based Brian Allen Simon (aka Anenon), arrives roughly a month after the opening of his performance series at L.

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You hear musicians say stuff like “I’m doing it for the art” so often that you take it as the kind of self-preservation-motivated half-lie your local barista tells her/himself every morning so s/he can get out of bed and go pour lattes for mouth-breathers, only to play a show later that night for an audience of three loyal friends, then fall asleep and wake up and do it all over again the next day without giving up hope and/or losing sanity. Putting all that probably sound judgment (but judgment, nonetheless) aside, Anenon a.k.a. Brian Allen Simon is really doing it for the art.

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