James Welburn certainly conjures up a sense of epic with this new LP, Sleeper In The Void. The reactive pleasure that is “Raze” ritually burning through your mind like a restless phantom, then plunge-pooled into a corrosive bath of grainy noise, twisting Soliloquy For Lilith-like on bassy parabolics and flickers of percussive recoil until the drama is daggering divergent colours and serpentine mirage.
A masterful atmospheric, the gorgeous rub of “Falling From Time” picks up from, all prism-poured and swivelling, its stapled techno chewed over in taut kettle and bulletting snare as scimitared cinematics sliver through. Where others would nosedive into a snowstorm of distorted abandon, here you’re treated to sculpted vistas that dramatically melt in the ear, adding fresh perspectives on the unfolding.
The brooding oasis of chiming frets and church bells on the title track ooze a doomic sensibility that doesn’t have any room for cliché, suddenly smashed into by some mighty fine dirgey percussion that shines in sweaty physicality (courtesy of Swedish drummer Tomas Järmyr). Scenics that agitate, wallow in a growing opaque, then are Icarus-torn, left to harmonically eat their mirrored selves. These are textures you can taste, absorb — those chainsawed guitars coat-tailing Juliana Venter’s vocal crescents on “In And Out Of Blue” are a real roller-coaster of production prowess, attentive and teetering, serrating the structure with exciting accents. A gambit that dynamically injects, throws the mournful drone of the next track “Parallel” into stark relief, as Hilde Marie Holsen’s distended trumpet drone is morayed in sabre-flanged fracture and murmuring crevice, a hawthorn-rubbed aperture that burrows into your head, shimmers like a heat-licked hallucination.Which leaves the rotten techno shuffle of the last track to provide a satisfying epitaph, ransom-whipped in splashy metallics and electrocuted back sweeps as a crooked one-word ballad spatters through, engorged in vocal abstracts. Sleeper In The Void is a bold, adventurous journey that ovals a blissful oblivion.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
