Deko 2026
Setting Celtic sensitivity onto interstellar canvas, Transatlantic ensemble access secret locations and unlock drama they haven’t dreamed of.
Fragments
Collaborations with Bridget Wishart hold a special place in the SPIRITS BURNING lore, for the former HAWKWIND warbler brings a unique female perspective to predominantly macho adventures the many albums Don Falcone’s project offered to sci-fi aficionados over the years. The English lady may have joined the Californian troupe both onstage and in the studio, as part of a larger cast, yet it’s on the song-cycles like "Make Believe It Real" from 2015, where her creative input is equal to the band’s, that the music they compose enter, of rather form, another dimension, a space at the heart of this platter. With a titular piece harking back to the aforesaid opus and a string of five freshly finished numbers based on the chanteuse’s Shakespearean novel “Caoimhe Tales” she also recites from, over a mostly minimalistic, unintrusive instrumental backdrop, at the end of the record, the multiple tableaus of “Fragments” congeal into something magical.
The listener will feel as much from the very beginning, once a tripartite “Natural Suite” floats into view on a wave of white noise until the motorik, albeit chamber, “Natural Order” – which rolls in, to loom large, on Falcone’s organ and piano – snaps to Wishart’s arrestingly worded spoken stanzas and barely-there lines sung mostly as counterpoints. But if “The Door” charmingly takes it all on a groovy timewarp first towards yé-yé innocence and then, after a heartbeat-measured gap, vaudevillian joviality, the marching “Sombre” resolves the ecologic panorama as a soft parade. That’s how the stage is set for the aural spectacle of Bridget’s story, with wordless “Piper” – which gently opens and closes the second suite in the crosshair of her flute and Lee Potts’s mandolin – shaping a folk-informed and orchestrally tinged wonder the between cuts flesh out through imaginative nuances.
Yet while the lysergic “Tides” rides an array of cosmic synthesizers and bounces off polyrhythmic percussion to the predatory, riff-ruffled dancefloor, the haunting “Dark Eyes” marries sensual vocal delivery to robust heaviness and majestic interplay. And though “Spin” turns it into a symphonic experience destined to get under the audience’s skin and stay there as an emotional tattoo, the album’s magnificent title track reaches further into the ether to retrieve a cinematic sonic travelogue, Bridget’s duet with guitarist Jerry Jeter, that manages to stay static and, at the same time, move the hearer to a different plane of existence.
That’s what “Fragments” aims for and that’s what it gloriously achieves.
*****
