When asked about this latest collaboration with the Italian band Zu, David Tibet says they “made something very beautiful and very powerful for me to skip into”, and the surrounds certainly hold his words in a perfect tension.
They massage the drama in a harp-like sharpness or a classical post-doom curdle, getting strum-stuck, tangled in a folklore shimmer, a dazzling meatiness sprinkled here and there, balancing the see-saw. A touch of electronics burring the firmament as Tibet’s moody thermals poetically pull you around with lyrical aloofness, a blur of connections that confuse and confound, yet still (somehow) manage to hit home. A jigsaw of quickly painted impressions, where new and old metaphorically swim, meter that murmur of the fallen empire inside.
The slow, stately bleed of “The Coming Of The Mirror Emperor” has Tibet holding court to nocturned acoustics in a drift of autumnal leaves that feeds that sorrow-swifted flow beautifully. A flotilla(ed) ballad that has Tibet setting the scene as if reading from some ancient papyrus, painting the Mirror Emperor as “the king of un-colour” in an aubergine(d) night of tasty arrows. A seductive burn that the meaty bass of the following “Confirm The Mirror Emperor” greedily expands, David looming over, positively possessed, tearing out the words in tangled tangents that fill Zu’s handiwork with a maligned magnificence.
Yes, two tracks into the album and it’s already hooked me straight in, and even when the mood softens its gentle perfume still bewitches. The high-pitched fizz of “Enters The Mirror Emperor” giving a magical singing tree frosting, an eerie atmosphere that animates the primitive child-like sparkle of that cover, silvers a jagged Japanese garden to Tibet’s lamping accelerants. Zu’s instrumentation is always texturally twinned to Tibet’s fevered vision in a melancholic unison for your senses to soak up, scenically stabbing between narrator and musician. “Believe the crayons and smudges of kid’s inks”, Tibet warns, peppering a cryptic prophecy, the encroaching storm and snarling sizzle that’s always a track away quietly bends its serpentine way through the pastoral. The wax cylinder chant of “The Heart Of The Mirror Emperor”, its pulsed tracklines cantering the word curls, that romancing rub of wavery guitar serifing a shimmering silhouette of the mirage kingdom awaiting its ruler. The purring perfection of “The Absence Of The Mirror Emperor” is one of Tibet’s more commercially reaching tracks, a wolf in sheep’s clothing full of thorned impressions and flinting furnaces. Its skin slipping bucolically on sword skies, “the sermon of the hollow king”, compounds Tibet, “the liar in your heart, the insatiable hater” as he highlights our undoing, the Anti-Christ in us all.The curious softness of “Before The Mirror Emperor”, a Myrninerest-esque vibe tinged in milk bottle electronics and bird song hedges as those cellos chase wisps of gentle guitar, the Honeysuckle Aeons accumulatives of “Imp Trip Of The Mirror Emperor” spilling a rosy rapture too. But it’s when things get darker it truly satisfies. The slow and sinewed saturates of “To Meet The Mirror Emperor” are daubed in a Goya-like obsessiveness and rumbled percussives, a darkening palette that extends to the rousing closer “Awake The Mirror Emperor”, where abstracted applause falls into a dulcimerised spiral. A tapering twilight through which Tibet vividly screams, sends a susurrant sizzle of the sinister though a mournful cello reprise.
Like 2016’s Hypnopazuzu album, Mirror Emperor gives plenty for the converted to salivate over, and maybe provides the uninitiated a compass point to new discoveries.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
