I Monster: Neveroddoreven (2004)

Thoughts & Feelings

Keywords: space, time travel, spring, fairy tale

During my spa night I listened to this album twice through — one while busy and again while writing. I bought it on Bandcamp in 2022 after "Daydream in Blue" came up in a YouTube recommended playlist. I'd heard the song before but when exploring the full album I felt like it heard me (cheesy). Listening to this is like wandering through a fairy tale forest on another planet in another timeline. It's comforting like the first few weeks of spring, still cool but with livelier colors and more activity. It was hard to be still through some of these songs, especially "Stobart's Blues" and "The Backseat of My Car" which both played during meditation. (I like a challenge!)

SPA NIGHT means I took an extra nice shower, did a bit of grooming and lotioning, put on a face mask, stretched, meditated, and drank lots of water. After a spa night, I feel whole and real and refreshed.

Random facts:

• Neveroddoreven is a palindrome.
• This is I Monster's second studio album.
• The album contains a hidden song, "Cells," found only by skipping back when playing the first track. This is only available on CD and not in the digial or vinyl versions.

Favorite tracks:

• Daydream in Blue
• Who Is She?
• Stobart's Blues
• The Backseat of My Car

Pregap Hidden Tracks

The first track found on CDs is a 2-3 second moment of silence that most people don't detect. This Track 00 is skipped when players begin an album; it's encoded for the disc to start playing Track 01. In 1994, the founder of Justice Records filed a patent for putting a hidden song in that spot (read more detail about it in "Mind the Gap"). The only way to access Track 00 is to start the CD and quickly skipping backwards. Not all CD players support this functionality (many will take you to the last song on the album or simply restart the first song).

Before the patent, a handful of bands did the same, including Electric Light Orchestra's Face the Music 1993 reissue. There is a 34-second reversed version of the first track, "Fire on High." The "discovery" of this CD-exclusive feature was made by several other audiophiles. Since it unreliably plays on CD players, it's a CHOICE to include one in your album, limited to one format/customers who purchase the CD who happen to have the right type of player. There's something about that that's very cool — choosing to add something only a few are technologically capable of listening to.

When I was a teen I had a few of the albums with tracks hidden in the pregap but I don't recall that I ever knew about this, so it's fascinating to learn about this piece of music and technology history now!