Brown Spirits – Cosmic Seeds / Rose City Band – Sol Y Sombra

With 2025 already feeling somewhat weighed down with algorithmically-enhanced gloom, we’re undoubtedly going to need some sheer aural abandonment to get through the remaining pre-spring period… and indeed beyond. Enter then two new releases following divergent trajectories, aligned towards taking us away from it all.

Up first is Cosmic Seeds, the fifth album from Brown Spirits. Making up the third non-archival act on the Soul Jazz roster, the Melbourne-based Tim Wold (guitars, keys, synths), Agostino Soldati (drums, percussion) and Ash Buscombe (bass) are markedly not averse at exhibiting fierce and flexible democratic musicality, as illustrated by this new full-length set, which follows on from still-fresh Freq–reviewed outings from their less-gregarious labelmates, Hawksmoor and Trees Speak.

Although home-recorded once again, the eight gathered cuts are far from sounding hissy or boxed-in, through their varying degrees of expansiveness. At times, it feels like the threesome have snuck back in history to visit a cavernous vintage all-analogue studio, to bend and sculpt out their jams in one non-stop overnight session. The net result is a collection that serves itself up as a heady genre-straddling stew.

Therefore, from start to finish, we’re spun through a string of near-seamless cross-fusions. This means opening with the tremendous ten-minute “Fault Lines”, which vigorously smudges the boundaries between Floating Coffin-era Thee Oh Sees and The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland, in a way that merits a lie-down after some airings.

Thereafter, proceedings weave between Can’s most funkified motorik modes (“Mind Rocker” and “Out Out Out”); Maggot Brain-meets-Bitches Brew odysseys (“Magnetic Fields” and “Beat On Repeat”); astral-prog-jazz (“Magenta Haze” and the title track); and some languid yet squelchy psychedelic noodling (“Winter Solstice”).

Although it’s quite apparent that the three members of Brown Spirits are heavily under the influence of their combined record collections, Cosmic Seeds is richly distilled to the point where its intoxicating qualities ultimately transcend any magpie-minded ingredients gathering.

With the launch of this fifth LP from Rose City Band, it’s somewhat hard to believe that group leader Ripley Johnson has also been frontman for Wooden Shjips and Moon Duo, given how far his current main venture is removed from more sonic edge-pushing nature of those two still hiatus-residing operations.

Sol Y Sombra finds Johnson and co. drifting even further into blissed-out lightly cosmic retro-Americana, seemingly straddling the fine line between the hazy and the lazy along the way. Certainly, the introductory pedal-smeared chugging country highways-loving twosome of “Lights On The Way” and “Open Roads” are the most straightforward pair of Sweetheart Of The Rodeo-meets-The Gilded Palace Of Sin hybrids from the ensemble to date, with similar sibling pieces spread across the rest of the release.

Yet, as on previous RCB long-players, there is some internal space left in which things stretch out into subtly interesting places, to stop the band from playing it too safe. Hence, you can find faint echoes of David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name in the lush vocal layering inside “Evergreen” and “Sunlight Daze”; delicious percussive wigging-out towards the tail-end of “Seeds Of Light”; shimmering disco-funk grooves throughout the all-too-short instrumental “La Mesa”; and soulful keyboard swells on “The Walls” that nod affectionately to The Band.

Contently immersed in Ripley Johnson’s latter-day laidback bubble, Sol Y Sombra ultimately lacks an edge to really get a grip upon, but if you are needing some unpretentious and sun kissed escapism at the murky end of winter, it fits the bill assuredly enough.

-Adrian-