Read the Full Review

The ambition involved in a 6-song album with a run time of nearly an hour and 15 minutes, and “conceptualized as the ethereal dreams of a cosmonaut in suspended animation while he traverses interstellar space”, is a rare thing to find in the indie space. 

Though sprinkled with keys and synths, for the most part the arrangements on this album are fairly sparse despite the grand and galactic feel of it all. The drums and bass are the constants, providing a coherent underpinning for a variety of sonic and melodic explorations on the guitar.

The drums are played, and spectacularly so, by Combover Beethoven’s own Unit, who’s becoming something of a session player fixture on the globalized Internet Indie scene. They’re delightfully atmospheric, thunderous at times, swimming in enough reverb to make them feel as though they’re echoing through the abyss.

It’s over this skeleton that guitarist and primary composer Brian Lynch stretches the meat of these creations - a range of guitar sounds and ideas, never particularly complex, but always patient, thoughtful, tasteful, and devastatingly effective.

There is a lot to love in this album - the staggering scope, the herculean patience, the self-control, the imagination, the atmosphere - and I don’t imagine any 2 listeners will come away with the same perspective on what it did best. For me, it’s a singular piece of work from a singular artist, a vision no one else could’ve realized, and one that’s immensely rewarding to anyone with the time and bandwidth to pay it the proper attention.

Read the Full Review