This re-visit to The Utopia Strong sound-world is a meditative one, full of sketched atmospherics, where splintered notes seem to levitate, shimmer to symbiotically smile. A chemistry lesson whose individual tracks blur into a sensory whole, subtly pulled three ways, but still sparking a hypnotic unity.
This latest offering has a really mellow glint about it, full of pulse-slowing smears and petering perspectives; loads of breathable depth too, not afraid to pepper the grain with a bit of field-recorded grit.
That inviting Alpha Centauri-like spike of an opening track “Trident Of Fire”, its feathering descent slipping seamlessly into the diamonding dorsal of “Persephone Sleeps”. A solarised softness of rainbowing geometries and eroding trajectory that effectively shaves off reality’s sharp edges. The spiralised beauty of “Shepherdess” too, namastéd in pebbling beat and eastern flavour as the sounds of subtle cowbells are caught on this lovely fluted wing, then gossamer-thrown to an opalescent sky.
Environmentals filtering into the rain-splattered curling keys of “Disaster 2”, its bagpiped piquettes and heavy dronal undertow suggestively flumed, serpenting into the album’s absolute highlight, “Revelations”. Its luminous clusterings ominously discolouring in an UnicaZürn-like industrialisation, a kohl-eyed miasma of pulsing warning and shivering canopy that tightropes your consciousness so superbly.
Crafted contours the technicolored tinnitus of the title track swarms with, as loose-limbed mirages and jazzy tadpoles attentively twist. Reactive shapes that hug your mind, stretch in vaporising ascents and contorting progressives. Mood-soaked texturals that savannah the sun-soaked kosmische of “Castalia”, whose delicate psychedelic vistas cling to you like a waking dream.Bloody beautiful stuff.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
