Best in an Array of Instrumentation
The opening track Sonmoi
is a psychedelic guitar aural wrap-around, and the echoes and loops at times
remind me of elements in The Chamber Brothers’ Time Has Come Today, though the acoustic oriental additions make it
different too. This is followed by more echoing faroutness in A Search, this too moving out of the
electric into acoustic, and a significant move to vocal chorus and apparent horns,
this latter synthesised and into a 60s/70s foreign cinema soundtrack. It is
beautiful.
There is further beauty in third track JBS where a cascading vibration of beautiful guitar chords and lead
sweep across the musical panorama. The first lyrical interjection and singing I think I
lost my mind is also an intrusion on an otherwise self-speaking instrumental of
tranquillity, not so much in its contradictory assertion but the slightness of
that vocal – not a sound that fits, for me, the otherwise majesty of the
playing, though later harmonies do rise up and into the swelling mix.
Indeed, the vocal as on fourth Star Stuff, a more pop-oriented song, isn’t the album’s strength,
but to be fair that is a relative comparison. There is here more excellent
guitar work but the singing, even echoed, is a light fixture in the
instrumental firmament.
The funk and near-reggae of echoing guitar on fifth Steve
Pink returns to more expansive musical paintings, a reverberating soundscape of
joyous breadth. Next Disco Kid continues the funkiness, and wah-wah with other
effects guitar closes out in more evidence of the album’s instrumental core and
strength.
The jazz fusion with swathes of echoing vocal [and at end
bird-chirps] in seventh Don’t Blame
Yourself is eight minutes of joining psychedelia, a spaceship ascending
straight out of Hendrix’s Electric
Ladyland. Closing instrumental Cascade
showcases Jonathan Mattson on drums in a fine fusion of funkiness, his twin
brother Jared continuing on superb guitar and Chaz [Toro Y Moi] superb on an
array of instrumentation.
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