Those prolific Ashtray Navigations have more lo-fi on your hi-fi – a ten-track odyssey that leaves your brain a fizzin’.
The diode-soaked bag-piping of the first takes no prisoners, brings back that glittery glutton of “Bird’s Beak”, oozy with a plunge-pool of sticky sauce celebratories. Meditatives you tune into, adjust your antennas towards and the slippery eels of “The Tactic” make it far easier to disgust.
A slow kosmische-crowed spiral that falls straight into your ears, its snaky undulating verve voodoo(ed) in pinned piano and the stretchy recoil of goat skin. The windscreen-slapping force of “The Blizzard” knotting things up again, besieging textures scooping a weird ’80s undergloss as this crooked motif chews out of that over-saturated grip like a mangled memory.
Phil Todd has an exciting grasp on things here, filling your head with clanking repeats, then custarding the gears in malformed syrupiness — it’s all about the betweens, the jiving love of that congestive highway to somewhere new. A Dirt Mummies And Bloody Amps reunion which slips a jazzy overcoat over a savaged impression of the Doctor Who theme on “The Fool”, then cluster-candies into “The Spectrum”’s weaving Hunderwasser-like quilted colours, sees its alternating flicker and aerosolled tinfoil punch-weaved through a wanderlust lick of fretologicals. The superb lilting loveliness of “The Feather” that follows this is an Ash Nav high that sees seaside hissolics frothing over in a wah-ha lush interweave as smarting percussives snip at that thirsty melodic. A splurgy, bent-up brightness solarised in a planktonised pliability that earworms pure delight. This could have easily filled an entire side of the record, but moves into the nervous shimmer shanty of “The Panic”, its mulchy amalgam suitably backlit in the detuned drone of ambulance, squeezing out of its psychedelic fishnets into an undulating octocilli-stranded florescent replete with glistening guitar heroics.A brilliant burn the comedic sleuth noir of “The Case” panthers away from, has your eyeballs agog to its vaporising tapers and smeary hypno-centric lounge lizards. Another playful tug at your heartstrings that leads to the gothic pillow flight of “The Ink Circle”, where a sustained drone is serenaded by a dextrous Dr Phibes floating out to a fluted demise, leaving the eight seconds of passing traffic that is “After You Play This” to fling you a final question mark.
Another brilliant slice of what Ashtray Navigations do best.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
