What a nice surprise this record turned out to be. It's on legendary Finnish microlabel 267 Lattajaa, but these fellas are in fact American, and while they do traffic in a similar style as many of those forest Finns we love so much (Avarus, Anaksimandros, Kemialliset, Islaja) they seem to hew closer to the drifting murky, field recording flecked nature folk of the Jewelled Antler collective. But all that makes them sound super derivative, which they definitely are not. Three songs, all woven into one gorgeous sonic patchwork, tangled and gloriously blissed out, beginning with a soft bramble of acoustic guitars, hovering on a bed of blear eyed FX, over the top, sing-songy falsetto vocals coo and croon, sounding not unlike Glenn from Skygreen Leopards. The second track is a strange lo-fi rhythmscape, focused around a martial drum beat, pounding tribal and insistent over a swirling morass of processed vocals, bits of shimmering feedback, murky ambience, and thick swells of subtly melodic whir. The final track, which at 17 minutes makes up the bulk of the record, is a sprawling epic, that traverses all sorts of different sonic territories, managing to make them all sound wholly interconnected. A burst of hiss and damaged FX, synths and feedback, gives way to deep resonant stretches of metallic buzz, which in turn give way to some aggressive acoustic guitar strumming and muted percussion, a creepy haunting Comus-like ritual, before morphing into an ever changing soundscape of glistening melody, rumbling low end, fractured folk, and smeary soft focus abstract ambience, finishing off with an almost peppy sounding outro, all major key guitar, strange percussion, a simple barely there rhythmic pulse, and slithery strands of glimmering fuzzy melody. Wow. The bad news is... we only got a handful of these, and we're not entirely sure we'll be able to get more. But give it a go, fans of dreamy abstract free folk do NOT want to miss out on The Grand Hotel..." Aquarius Records
1 comment:
conocía este disco pero lo tenía olvidado.. gracias por recuperarlo
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