It's Broken by Transverse

In a sonic wasteland scorched by machine reverberations and severed circuit elegies, Transverse—the collaborative force of Matthew Richter and Jason T. Lamoreaux—crafts an unsettling yet oddly restorative journey through post-industrial dreamscapes. Discarded elements of broken rhythms, volatile drones, and mechanized auditory collisions are hurled together in an anarchic cascade of aural experimentation. Yet from this rubble, something transcendent emerges.

Drawing from field recordings—some seemingly captured adrift in maritime purgatory, others washed ashore in ghostly silence—the duo assembles sound in a way that is both artificial and alive. Each piece suggests a contemplative pilgrimage through the echoes of collapsed systems and half-remembered futures.

As jarring as it is redemptive ::

Their third album, It’s Broken, threads a narrative as jarring as it is redemptive. From the convulsive transmissions of “Capitalism is the Noose,” where sonic detritus pulses with subversive intent, to the frantic entropy of “Tick Tock Motherfuckers,” a kinetic unraveling of precision into raw emotion, the collection submerges us in a beautiful malfunction.

The opener, “It’s Not the Fall that Kills You, It’s the Deductible,” cascades with metallic piano motifs and a looming mechanized malaise, setting the tone for a record that confronts decay with unflinching grace. In “A Moment to Breathe,” time disintegrates into lucid stillness, offering an interlude of cerebral clarity amidst the chaos.

And then, the finale: “It’s All So Fucked Up”—a cosmic absolution, cloaked in shimmering synthesizers that stretch like starlight across ruins. It’s here, in the heart of collapse, that Transverse delivers its most poignant message: that from wreckage, resonance can still rise. A dystopia, yes—but one that hums with the potential for beauty to emerge, fractured and luminous.
https://igloomag.com/reviews/transverse-its-broken-somewherecold
Pietro Da Sacco
Igloo Magazine

"It's Broken" is the third thematic album from the duo Transverse. Made up of Matthew Richter (autodealer) and Jason Lamoreaux (The Corrupting Sea), Transverse is a permanent project for the duo and It's Broken is their third release to date.

The album decries the horrors of the United States healthcare system. It is a predatory system that pays investors before helping patients. Greedy CEO's make millions off of the suffering of others in a crass and cruel system. People go bankrupt just to pay their medical bills, people die cutting out necessary pharmaceuticals because they need the money to eat, and the pressure that mounts every year when healthcare coverage cycles again and the deductible is once more in play.

Beyond the bills, people in the United States pay a monthly fee for insurance, then they pay a deductible that is in the thousands of dollars before the insurance kicks in, and then when one meets that expectation, one still needs to pay 20% of hospital bills on average. It ends up being too much money for families in the United States as most families here do not make a living wage. Many people work three part time jobs and have to pay for healthcare out of pocket.

While the state of the nation is clearly in the dumpster, Transverse has been wanting to address this particular problem for some time and does so with "It's Broken". A piece of the slow, now fast, moving apocalypse unfolding within the North American continent.