There are certain records that no one in this world is supposed to touch, much less listen to, much less love or show affection to. People often refer to those as “challenging” or “difficult” records — “Live Alone, Live Alone” is one of those, a fascinating subject of exploration for some, a test of endurance for others.

Recorded in a small room to no audience, Live Alone is short on production values, but there’s something weirdly charming about it. “Monday Girl/Friday Girl,” the album’s opener, sounds like what would’ve happened had you took away all the fancy instruments from The Who and forced them to record “Baba O’Riley” on the cheapest equipment possible (an old dictaphone, in our case).

Then there’s the case of “Statue Jam,” with its painful and tortured monotony, not too far removed from the early industrial work of Throbbing Gristle and the like. One can almost picture the artist coming home from a back-breaking 9/5 and crying in frustration — well, there is no crying to be found here, but there is an inhuman howl spread all over the track which helps to support the theory.

Elsewhere, there’s a couple of guitar pyrotechnics showcases (“Guitar One” and “Guitar Two”, respectively) and plenty of tracks built around seemingly same unchanging and stumbling skeletal rhythm (with an occasional noisy guitar solo thrown in for a good measure, as heard on “The Killer” and “The Dance of the Dead”).

Again, Live Alone is not an easy record to love — and it seemingly isn’t asking to be loved (as J Moss, the man behind the project, points out on his blog, “another thing from me, who cares, right?”). While most people will likely reject this one in favor of something more melodic, I believe that this a record that opens up to the listener, especially an open-minded kind — while technically crude, it does display a certain inexplicable charm that is often absent  from similar lo-fi/experimental records.