ALBUM REVIEW: 'Unwell' by LIMINAL SPIRIT

TRACK LISTING:

1. Admittance

2. Unwell (click link to listen)

3. Visiting Day

4. EOLC

5. A Better Place

REVIEW:

This was a tough listen, thematically-speaking, as someone who’s worked with the elderly for a long time and has witnessed their inevitable decline time and time again. It is a helpless, powerless feeling for anyone with even a shred of the ability to empathize. Losing one’s autonomy is a terror which unites even the proudest of us with the most unassuming.

It is humbling, to say the very least.

It’s a brave and relatively unexplored topical undertaking, the thought process of the dying, demented elder left alone in a nursing facility - and I believe that singular, instrumental virtuoso Jerry Hauppa pulled it off quite victoriously.

For Unwell, Hauppa wrangled several duties: all the guitar, bass, drum programming, synthesizer, vocoder, and violin work! He is also the mind behind the bone-chilling lyrics, which afford zero regards for the listener’s feelings.

It’s obvious that he WANTS you to squirm. And squirm I did, as I remembered my own time working at various nursing facilities. It even conjured up a few tears, as I recalled some of my favorite long-term care residents, and some of the lonelier souls I encountered in my work. I only wish I could have done more for them, but alas...

Hauppa, too, has experience working with the elderly, and has witnessed the plight of forgotten and abandoned seniors over and over again in his previous tenure.

He describes LIMINAL SPIRIT’s sound as “séance music from a restless spirit.” I’d agree, going on to label Unwell as a progressively hope-obliterating doomscape. It is cinematically saddening. It is existential dread committed to a rather visual-inducing sound. It is punishing, it is ruthless, and it is as unforgiving as experiencing oneself coming unraveled.

Unwell is meant to conjure horror, sympathy… and horror all over again, as the truth of the main character Phillip’s dark backstory is revealed track by unrelenting track.

No bullshit: it left me with a lot of uncomfortable questions, yet it nourished my desire to do better, and to be a better human to my fellow mortals. I can only imagine that being one of many intended side effects of LS’s tertiary opus.

Capturing the desolation of dementia and the abject terror and helplessness of cognitive and bodily decline in an artful way - in sound format - is no easy feat, nor must it have been a light affair.

RATING: I give it a 4/5; my one complaint being that I wish the lyrics weren’t as difficult to parse out while merely listening to the music. They deserve to be heard and meditated on. But I love it - I love the concept and the overall delivery - and I wish more people would hear it and think on what it’s trying to tell them!

Recommended for those who enjoy the works of: JESU, CYNIC, CONFESSOR, SWANS, and SKEPTICISM.

LIMINAL SPIRIT LINKS: Bandcamp: here. Instagram: @liminal_spirit_mke

MORE ALBUM DETAILS:

• Released October 31, 2025

• Third release from LIMINAL SPIRIT.

• "Welcome to My World" in track 1 is presented by Jim Reeves.

• All other music written, recorded and mixed by Jerry Hauppa.

• Role of Madeline performed by Kaitlyn Menden.

• Mastered by Jeff Wojtysiak at Spiral Sound Mastering.

• Cover art by James Becker.

• Microtonal guitar present on Unwell, EOLC and A Better Place provided by kiteguitar.com