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-
