This is an intriguing collection of sound horded moments, omni-chord colour, full of subverted rhythms and machine skylights, bleeding away on checker board effects and inventive colour…proper late night material, especially in the latter half of the album, where the kicks are smoothed out into dreamier concoctions.
The album opens on a short slip-footed shuffle, with samples thrown into the gaps, coming across like a Moroccan shanty, cut-up, filled with electronic gooiness and rain drops on concrete. Suddenly, everything explodes on a dust cloud of Funkadelics… 70’s cop show action and solo guitar basketry, other snippets puncturing, coming in and out with a giddy logic… horns heralding the switch…Hand claps … vivid with 40’s cartoon interludes, chopped up and reshuffled.
Dark Forest - Sliver Sea has Stephen Hawkins catching the hic-cups... ‘say bops’ in melting guitar and delayed female murmurings, Going all tree-top piano, canoeing those tambourines across a glitched surface glare, alive with diaphanous insects… Looping out a warm glow under the vocal scramble of train terminals caught on bird shapes. Light pings and gulls, geese throwing out distant v’s...
Tinfoil beats on Hobby Horse are full of 80's sci-fi traction ... dipping atmospheres and slapped percussion creating ever eager outcomes, itchy beats becoming splashy, the odd orchestral gilded hiss, click and speeding lick. Clingfilm sliverfish getting all slippery and acrobatic.
By the Plane Sailing Song, the pace mellows on airy exhales, the reminder of the album blurring out on a scrapbook of orchestral rainbows and zapped nostalgia, lounge with a hint of the National Geographic about it. An Aladdin's cave of optimistic and strange tasting combinations with mild lustres of genius that headphones were invented for... space wobbles dusted on country dopplers, snatches of tune, jigsawed in effervescent fancy...
Curious Memories has a stellar, drift away vibe, that melts in your semi-circular canals like butter on hot corn... slight touches of unease creeping round the hedgerow... keeping everything from slipping into sentimental ambience.
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