Days Between Stations 2024
Painting an aural portrait of a visual artist, Californian purveyors of art-rock find their own identity.
Keeping it minimal has never been this duo’s intent – neither in terms of their imagination’s span nor with regard to the cast of their platters where stellar guests, who augmented the allure of Oscar Fuentes-Bills and Sepand Samzadeh’s melodies, sometimes blurred cinematic purity of their focus. On display from the Los Angelenos’ self-titled debut onwards, their filmic tunefulness was dressed in words on subsequent records, but too much happened in the world since "Giants" began roaming the earth in 2020, so the two players had to shift their paradigm back to the band’s original settings and return to a project abandoned more than a decade ago. What ended up on “Perpetual Motion Machines” isn’t their first score for screen, yet though a documentary about the artist Jean-Paul Bourdier didn’t feature any of the music the friends wrote to accompany the footage before falling out with producers, those pieces got salvaged to distill the ensemble’s view of themselves.
This is why opener “Waltz For The Dead” – where accordion and piano draw joie de vivre from sorrow to move the creepy funfair merriment from Paris to Sarajevo until spectral voices take over from the ivories to further enliven the mesmeric panorama – feels so cathartic, especially when followed by cosmic raga which “Proof Of Life” spikes with steady groove and “Seeds” infuses with gradually swelling orchestral grandeur. Samzadeh’s ruminative guitars render it all simply irresistible, but Fuentes-Bills’s chamber keyboards make the solemn “Unearth” just as touching – contrasting “Intermission 4” that, in less than a minute, injects warm electronica into the mix, and preparing the palate for “Stone Faces” and “Paradigm Lost” where the duo’s finely detailed progressive leanings come forth to dance. And then there’s the breathtaking ballad “Ascend” to approach the dynamic apex of the pair’s flight and lay the existential groundwork for epic “Being” that hosts Durga McBroom’s soul-piercing vocals and that’s otherwise seems not as impressive as Oscar and Sepand’s instrumental paintings.
Nevertheless, the resulting sonic landscape is transcendentally impressive, opening portal to a different dimension, to the locale of bright colors and eternal reveries.
*****