If you like hazy guitar improv, this is solid. Four lengthy crafted excursions dusted in a ghosting of late ’60s psychedelia and geologically pinned to a Neolithic underground burial complex in Malta.
Its creators losing their shape to the strummed haze being conjured, dissolving into that sonic sweet spot. A shifting symmetry that breathes plenty, opulently curls your consciousness like something long forgotten. I’m no stranger to Neil Mortimer’s Urthona, but this mysterious supergroup UFO67 exhumes an equally powerful pull.
Opening on smeary radio broadcasts and intercom that are quickly fret-spectred, ambivalently pearled, UFO67 ease you into their subterranean world. A slow shifting introspective space that feels very much in situ, enclosured and trembling, texturally irradiated in radiophonic fallout and distant percussives. The air charged in wah-crusted sweeps and bleaching glints, a primitive riffery suddenly burning through, glowing phosphorescent. A nexus that spirals and torques to champagne a richly rubbed repetition that chemically digs in there, pays homage to the dusted twilight of the place before limping off in vaporising damage and a dim murmur of some ancient half-heard broadcast.The second track satellites an effect-haggard strum, fed-back and overlaid by a rotarised weal of electronics. An undulating emphasis that arcs archaeological, erupts in a massive tangle of sounds, churning up on a lovely overdriven Les Rallizes Dénudés-esque bruised sunset. Pushing red and beyond, peppered in miraging brilliance, lamenting the dying light with a ripe Magical Power Mako Hapmoniym abstraction.
A mix of shortwave classical glitch / swampy movie dialogue intersperses, then under-slips a cymbal-swiped slither. An investigative dive in reverb-rubbed and echoed metallics as the guitar lifts all melodic-scarred, seeds a distance in your eyes that dissolves into an Angus blunt beated MacLise demise. The third harbouring a summery feel, a jangling sun-staring harmonic, torque-torn and tidal, that brings to mind the spectral physicality of an early Flying Saucer Attack track. Its tapering drone-like atmospheres fraying out in sparse spidery interjections, a reconfiguring that feeds an achingly beautiful reawakening. A delicate sunset yawn, caterpillared in whirling spans of hued colour and spoking rotaries, later percussively nibbled before being finally caught in the vaporising chill of the night-time air. An album favourite that has enjoyed plenty of replay.The last track rips more ritualised, antennas something ancient, tigering a subtle chant-like lilt – guitars expressively swimming your head with eerie ease. A fallen fruit down-rivering, all liquid light-curled and wahhhhhh warped, becoming avalanche-scarred and rattling to slowly corona a horizon-fed after-image.
These are lo-fi lullabies of the highest order, recently unearthed(?) or invented, hopefully to be rebirthed at this year’s Acid Horse, fingers crossed.-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
