If like me you loved Thighpaulsandra‘s debut or the panoramic nature of his Golden Communion album, I’m glad to report the big-band sound is back with a vengeance on this new offering.
As sprawling as it is provocative, this beast is an accomplished double helping that happily mingles menace with glitzy pop-tastics skewered in plenty of Stockhausen detours and atonal splurges. A largely song-based soiree, dashes of black humour and grandiose synth work abound, each track never starting where it finishes, its malleable betweens mood-swinging like a tree-skipping gibbon, grinning with mischievous intent.
The orator’s words shine, scenic playthings perversely weaselled, poking fun at the righteous. The music, just as anarchic, obsessively delighting in blushes of prog-like excess, scooping up funky spandex grooves or taut totem riffs beset with a warble of classical delicacies, suddenly slamming you unexpectedly into a host of bent-up and crumpled trauma.
Bold and marauding, it’s an entertaining ride that draws you into its theatrics askew, starfishes you back from the wreckage on a refreshed stream of consciousness piggybacking on a grinding bassline and creamy wizardry – psychedelically triggered melodics and adrenalined rushes that push intriguing holes through the fabric of its own reality.The jazzabelled tribal mantra of “The Curtain” erased into an ECM coma to comb-over a lush Spanish guitar and flourished balladry. A Julian Cope-like cadence chasing slippery abstracts and trickling diodes. The songwriting free-flow doesn’t disappoint, pillows with possibility, offset in ovalling obliques and star-clustered satellites, leaping headlong into some weirded-out Cardiacs-like operatics. In anybody else’s hands this might fall foul, flounder messily; but Thighpaulsandra’s trip marvels with the improbable, alchemises the errant with seamless ease.
The debauched hilarity of “Princess Margaret’s Mellotron” (bringing to mind Double Vulgar‘s ode to her royal highness) meal-worms the ridiculous, all raspberried and choral-tapered, “Sliding down the corridors of powerrrrr” skilfully subverting with toe-tapping tautness and genre-bending fluidity. That multifaceted voice plucking charismatic to later turn despotic on “Cattle Truck”, the music souring to blunted blows disembarking into some head-nodding wrongness and a zero-gravity suspense outage of rumble-roasted layers.I can’t begin to imagine the amount of work involved creating something this complex and widescreen, but my ears are enjoying every twist and turn. As the album ends on the sticky avant-garden of “The Brown Hare Remains”, I’m reminded again of Thighpaulsandra’s genius in conjuring a rarefied atmosphere. An oddly shimmering creature of a track, stabbed in reverbed-glowing rhythmics and gong-like metallics to skitter on an aftersun of chilled poetics slivering between French and English on this dusky purple pulse. A lilting ambience that tessellates like a slo-mo of broken petals wistfully lost to the gathering silence.
Acid And Ecstasy is another extravagant triumph that I’m going to be listening to for years to come.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
