Sedna Chronicles is a travel guide to the occult, unusual and downright eerie. English Heretic’s Andy Sharp and The Hare & The Moon’s Grey Malkin attempt to channel the weird energies trapped within their favourite Scottish haunts, and to be honestly they do a great job, the accompanying fold-out guide enhancing the experience.
The clattering clairvoyance of “Obscurus” dimensionally dining on a Coil half-light of drone and recoiling metallics wrapped in a viola’s sorrowful spin. An eerie warmth that charlestons into the creepy undulation of “Song To The Cliodna”, its flickering synth lines stretching the walls sticky with eastern European mantras as the harmonics cripple-cusp, slip the barnacle-encrusted skeletals littering a forgotten coast.
The whispered poignancy curling those “Blue Rats”-like darts of dance-ability of “The Last Drop”, its wavering apparitions breathing colour into its surroundings, the notorious Edinburgh tavern where convicted prisoners were offered a final libation before public execution, and home to the infamous body snatchers and a shadowy Thomas Weir floating over its dimly lit streets. “Children Of The Cove” descending into the subterranean chambers of Gilmerton to a soft ominous drone, furnished further by the descriptive dilation of the narrator. A potent pull full of questions as an elasticated stain of synth ovals an oozy imbalance released to a cloak’n’daggered cinematic sizzle, goblin-dancing a percussive Ennio Morricone punch, throwing out fresh perspectives to the expected solemn glow.The shady beast that is “Friends Of The Emerald Sun” dribbling along this bristly melodic, its diode-dithered plasticity a subtle hallucination, intimately hooking into by vocal shimmers and a Bruce Gilbert and Graham Lewis-like flutter that cerebrally rainbows, shivers into scattering keys and smeared transits.
An iridescent shot to the consciousness that the dirgey tint of “The Nunavut Letter” takes further as the narrator recounts Lieutenant John Irving‘s fading optimism towards his doomed arctic expedition. A gooey trespass that phantoms your imagination, tapering into a lullabying lacework as the letter’s words fade from view, pebbled in the watery crush of ice.Sedna Chronicles is a compelling atmospheric journey, ending on the chewed-up contouring of “Theme From The Murdered Apprentice”, its sonics seancing the strange magnetism of the Rosslyn ruins. A milky choralised resplendence shim-shunted in plodding guitar and tilted horizons that really gets under your skin — well done lads.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
