Dynamo Bliss 2013
Day And Night
Returning to their sophisticated roots, Sweden’s purveyors of deceptive serenity softly rock around the clock.
This trio’s first release of 2013 might bepuzzle those who thought of them as an art rock band, but while "Poplar Music" was a delicious detour around the band’s stylistic habitat, “Day And Night” delivers on the promise of 2011’s single “Circadian Rhythm” making it the concept album centerpiece. A light composition whose harmony floats on the breeze from Stefan Olofsson ivories, synthesizer layers interspersed with piano and undercut, the piece presents prog in its stately purest and taps at the Arcadian part of a 24-hour oscillation. Yet “Solemn Undulating Wave” gives it all a slight humorous slant in both its title and arrangement: boogie and psychedelic funk are quite unexpected successors to “The Day The Empire Fell with its dry poppy bobbing.
Turning anthemic, if quirky, as it goes, the band’s music draws on fusion, albeit it never loses sight of melody and only offsets the tunes with a string of short instrumental vignettes scattered between the songs. But “Evenfall” lingers longer to fully shape the translucent sensation of twilight time, before the romantic strum of “Vespertine” picks up where the opening baroque caress of “Morning On Mars” left off, and “Night Storm” implants an insistent new age mood in the gracious bebop which goes all Gallic once Mikael Sandstrom’s accordion enters its sonic frame and makes an inroad into flamenco. This amazing ten-minute Trans-European trip that’s worth the price of admission alone and makes “Day And Night” a mild triumph. Let the circle be unbroken!
****4/5
