This is a sound of a unit finding themselves, but more importantly enjoying the journey.
Engaged more with evolution than polished product, the first track takes a while to find its feet, but when it does that buzz-cut guitar scooping up the rhythmic dance of “Strafing” is a welcome reward, its jangle of colour and reflected tensions finding delicate melodics that murmuring motorik fixation. “Skybluepink” continues this trend, a slow and subtle sketch like saturation veining a sunburn of loosely fitting repeats caught in a hazy summers day.
Dialling it back further, “Unscene” sizzles in a limbless abstraction, a lilting amorphic of slurpy sine and light jazzy ambles suddenly finding a beguiling snare snapped interlock to schism slide into a looping vocal. The skeletonised drop-stitch groove of “Stenahonix” is an interesting fusion that’s gonna be my personal favourite here. A percussive prickly pear, slippery with intent, its syncopated slant energised in some riffological rawness that stains you with its awesomeness.In reflection, that persistent strum and sparring percussive of the twenty-one minute finale “Reverie Duende” feels a bit detached at first, then this stretchy keytone purrs for under it and a subtle magic manifests. A solid conversation leaking in twanged highlights and a light dusting of beats. This shimmering loveliness that sinks right in there, inventively fills out in a multiverse of jigsawing flavours. A Venn diagram fracturing back into a confusion of separates. The DNA shifting into a series of casual unisons and funky break-outs, that flutter-flex and fade in each other.Plenty of unfinished business that hints of a greater whole.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-