“Man is the Dream of a Shadow” — Chicago-based Post-Punk Outfit Oddysseys Returns With “However You Want It”

Man is the dream of a shadow is awake

In his sleep but he’s only left to follow

In the wake of the day he’s troubled he’s ashamed by the reign

and the peaks of the pain that is doubled 

Oddysseys’ “However You Want It” begins with a premise familiar to anyone who has tried to make art while being observed: the work may be private, but advice is communal property. The band, born in Boston and now based in Chicago, has spent years bypassing the usual intermediaries, moving between festival stages and improvised punk spaces with the stubborn economy of a group accustomed to doing things itself. On this sixteen-song album, that ethic becomes both subject and method.

Across However You Want It, influences are easy to identify: Interpol, Bauhaus, early New Order, the Stone Roses, but Treon treats them as working materials. The album’s independence gives it coherence: sixteen songs made under one roof, answerable to one restless sensibility, testing how far private conviction can travel. Treon wrote, performed, engineered, mixed, and financed the record in a small Chicago apartment, where practical limits seem to have sharpened rather than diminished his ambitions.

“The entire process was about taking something that existed only as an idea and slowly bringing it into the material world,” he says. “One track at a time.” That description is almost comically modest for music this restless. However You Want It keeps changing its posture, moving from tense guitar music toward industrial club pressure, then back into songs where melody carries the emotional argument.

Shadow of a Sound is especially good at making instability feel physical. A bass line establishes the song’s post-punk skeleton while guitars borrow some of the looseness and abrasion of the Pixies and the cool spaciousness associated with Manchester. Treon’s lyrics, informed in part by Pindar’s Olympian Odes, turn psychological collapse into a problem of scale: shame, mortality, and self-judgment expand until the individual seems badly fitted to his own life. The song’s stream of consciousness suits that unease; thoughts pile up faster than certainty can organize them.

Cerbie, recorded before the album sessions, pushes in another direction. Paul DiRico plays bass and drums and adds backing vocals, while John Barrett’s Abbey Road mix gives the track unusual breadth. Industrial percussion and techno propulsion meet a chorus built for collective release, even as the lyric stares directly at death. Its gallows humor is crucial: mortality can inspire dread, but also impatience…if the ending is guaranteed, paralysis begins to look like a poor use of the interval.

Heaven Signs Clearly turns devotion into private theology. Jagged guitars and a driving rhythm frame images of blood, prayer, pain, and dependence, with the call-and-response vocal creating the sense of a congregation assembled around one person’s bad decision. Love here is voluntary suffering undertaken with full awareness, which gives the song its peculiar sting.

 Listen to However You Want It below and order the album here.

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