Spirit Of Unicorn Music 2023
Chilly gusts from the Windy City recalibrate its art-rockers’ outlook so that they could embrace new possibilities.
Stay For The Ending
In spite of popular perception, it’s not necessarily an epic piece that can provide a key to a progressive rock platter; sometimes, it’s a brief foray into a soundscape which is stripped of pretense that points to an album’s true meaning. Of course, the listener must stay on till the end of this record to grasp the entire picture the American ensemble paint so painstakingly on their first post-pandemic opus, having cleansed the audience’s palate with a concert performance of "Screens" and having let their chanteuse Leslie Hunt locate fresh passion on "Ascend" and "Descend" EPs. There’s vigorous, cerebral sensuality on display, and the quintet clearly didn’t conceive of leaving a clue to such an oxymoron in an “X marks the spot” way – only they did: in this opus’s second half, on a short cut titled “X” where human heartbeat and synthetic groove are gradually melded into one, not only setting the scene for the histrionic “X-Faded” but also allowing all to reassess what’s been aired before the mini-suite.
Beginning with a heavy riff of the title track, whose stuttering nervousness is passed to the piano-bolstered vocals that resolve tension in an anthemic chorus, the album’s aggressive stance may seem to alienate the aural spectator, yet there’s something arresting in this frenetic swirl of Jim Tashjian’s guitars and Andrew Lawrence’s keyboards – something dissolved in a delicate strum of “Mirror” until Tim Seisser’s bass and Jonathan Schang’s drums shatter the idyll by unleashing belligerent funk which will be smoothed with the ivories. However, when prog solos and sympathetic weave of voices enter the frame, more magnificent images float into focus to pour molten balladry over the church-solemn “Many New Things” and feed faux-orchestral, idée-fixe anxiety into the composition’s shifting tempos, while “Crossover” offers a fragile, sparse, if insistently falling, dewdrops for dynamic expanse to thrive on and bare some fusion threads.
The deceptive quietude is swept away once “Divided We Fall” switches the drift to metallic gallop and cosmic flight to fit the group’s “my way or highway” front and contrast the old-timey, sorrowful serenade of “Life Cycle” which slowly soars, facilitated by Leslie’s pipes, towards sentimental skies, and still, the rock ‘n’ roll swagger and arena-wide span of “Deck Is Stacked” feel unexpectedly welcome, apart from percussive extravaganza in its midst. It’s the bridge to “The Watcher”: the platter’s angular and baroque-vignetted, emotionally loaded and sonically fleshed out, unhappy and unsettling, albeit somehow fitting, finale. That’s the place for the whole experience to turn into rewarding, cathartic even, denouement – a spot worthy of waiting for and the ending promising another start.
****1/3
