In Those Days is a dark-fantasy jazz/blues concept album built on the book of Judges—half film score, half rock opera, all one continuous world.

Obligé scores a crownless Canaan with smoky horns, upright bass, haunted guitars, and stormy drums: temple nightclubs for Baal, crooked odd-meter stealth for the left-handed assassin, noir prophecy under the palm tree, iron chariots rolling like war machines, midnight tension in Jael’s tent, Gideon shaking in a winepress, a daughter caught in the teeth of a vow, and a man who looks ordinary but tears down gates and pillars by a strength that makes no sense.

Some tracks play like pure score, others like songs sung from inside the story, but the same themes keep resurfacing—motifs slipping between sax lines and vocals, big-band blasts giving way to quiet, wounded prayers. This is Judges as a jazz-shadowed myth: no king, too many gods, and a handful of fragile people trying to stand up in the ruin.

The Song of Deborah

The Song of Barak

A fractured manifesto set to hard rock, machine pulse, and cinematic dread.

Coterie of Cretins is a broadcast from the fault line where humanity and technology intersect — not in harmony, but in discomfort, suspicion, and reluctant dependence. These songs live inside the fluorescent hum of a world where every device pretends to listen, every choice feels rehearsed, and every person is half algorithm whether they admit it or not.

Across twelve tracks, the album follows the last free thinkers, doubters, Luddites-for-likes, and digital ghosts as they move between locked doors, broken signals, and too-perfect faces. Some fight back. Some give in. Some just scroll until the scrolling stops.

The sound is heavy, resonant, metallic, industrial at its core but driven by human lungs and human fear. Guitars grind against synths. Drums slam against circuitry. Voices remain the last unprocessed instrument — desperate, stubborn, hopeful, furious.

This is not an album about technology.
It’s an album about living through it.

Coterie of Cretins asks one question repeatedly:

If this is the future, is there anywhere left to stand that’s still ours?

Through the Window

Angles of Angels

The Uncanny Valley

A Luddite for Likes

Parallel

The Grand Hallway

A lost rider and a singing companion are swept into the oldest story ever told.

After a desperate ride through a midnight storm, Buck Ramble and his faithful tenor companion arrive on the outskirts of Bethlehem just as the angel appears to the shepherds. They were never meant to be there—yet somehow they are. Their arrival shifts the story, and the angel turns to confront them. If they want the world to remain whole, they must remain and make it right.

What follows is a sacred western journey seen through the eyes of a man and his horse who never expected to witness a miracle. They follow the angel’s command to Jerusalem, where the Festival of Lights fills the Temple with fire and song. There, in the arms of an old man named Simeon, they behold the Child who would someday call Himself the Light of the World.

The encounter changes everything. They ride back not with answers but with peace—carrying a quiet flame that was never theirs to earn. The final songs are not about what happened, but what remains: light for the weary, mercy for the broken, and peace for every stranger still out on the road.

Part Christmas album, part biblical epic, part sacred western myth, Festival of Lights is the story of men who stumbled into prophecy by accident—and stayed long enough to be transformed.

Summary Themes:

Doubt & faith

Accident & providence

Smallness & glory

Light carried through darkness

The gentleness of redemption

The way God works in ordinary men

Tone:

Cinematic, reverent, frontier, mid-century hymn, sacred Americana, biblical poetry, quiet emotional catharsis.

This isn’t just a Christmas album.
It’s a pilgrimage.
And somewhere in its journey, the listener finds themselves in the story too.

A Light Left Burning

Volant Records is a story-driven label and shared universe: cinematic concept albums, stutter-house, western sagas, haunted pop, and hymn-like instrumentals. Home to Jupiter Morrow, Avaline Ingels, Shadow Face, Buck Ramble, Choralith and more. All Worlds Reserved®.