Eat Lights; Become Lights – Heavy Electrics

Rocketgirl

“Bound for Magic Mountain” is a whopping start. A neonised cascade choked full of bouncy goo and bleeping keylines breezes through your head like a mechanised kiss. The guitar kingpins transmitting a massive joy in kegs of wah-wah and laser, everything tilting to the max, smothered in copious effect shadowing. This has the cool scent of somebody totally enjoying what he does, mingling the past with present. Dispensing a motorik concoction similar to Camera‘s energetic repetitions, bringing new life into the groundwork NEU! and Kraftwerk bedded down all those years ago. Yep, you could say I’m enjoying this! Those slow starts and climatic rushes, all that overdriven impetus and contrasting ambience, each track melting into the other.

The following “Heavy Electrics” sounds like a chilled remix of the opener,  satellites quickly erased in favour of a pulsing hyperdrive, lock groove juice zimmered in tips of cymbal sheen. Eat Lights certainly love to churn things over – recurrings of recurrings, infinitely splattering like the centrifugal forces of a Hirst spin painting – circles in circles, speeding blurs pulsating away, an acceleration of guitars binding up the package in tasty shifts of perspective.

The percolating piano on “Syd Mead Cityscape,” full of comet-like detailing, evolves seamlessly. Before you know it, there’s a mellow Jean-Michel Jarre-esque landscape flowing through your ears, all smooth reminiscences that could have simply continued unhindered in overlapping chords (I wouldn’t be complaining) but then it suddenly zooms off into glittering über-beast, and you’re left thinking ‘wow!’ as the scenery is pulled around in radial spreads of light.

“Terminus IV” is the same, maybe to a lesser extent – its slow expansions countered in sketched tensions, pressure cooking stabs and rolling waves of percussion, gathering drums finally giving out the momentum, living it large, punctured and riff shadowed – then retracted back only to be quickly reincarnated into a dense forest of spiralling distractions. “Sunrise At Marwar Junction” eases you off the futurist highway completely. A glowing respite in a dew encrusted crystal, all Tahiti-hipped under some imaginary bleeding sun. A polymorphic lilt of melody that lingers, slowly softening towards silence, picked back up in the slow space age auras of “La Kraut III” – something blasted away in an Indesit of dynamo knits and over-excitement.

An aerobic spectrum of tune ends the album in an arterial sprayed sunset, a Vangelis-like chug holding firm as chords circulate, flanking colours that accompany your retina’s dance across the geometries of the cover.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-