Glass Castle 2025
The Uncertainty Principle
With a quantum leap into the science of sentiments, London duo add friendly intrigue to cold physics and Cold War conflicts.
A concept album about a scholastic concept might seem repulsive in its meta severity, yet it’s essential for many progressive rock artists to pursue this course, but while lesser mortals would find it irresistible enough to leave their feelings, as opposed to cerebral stance, outside of such record, Mark Gatland and Malcolm Galloway know better than to remove human factors from their music. So, adding half-imaginary storylines to the titular idea, as formulated by Werner Heisenberg about a hundred years ago, and rendering him as a presence on a couple of tracks here, the pair of pals who have been weaving sonics together since their school days infused “The Uncertainty Principle” with emotions without simplifying neither sophisticated arrangements nor lyrical approach. There’s no perceiving the complex theory as not seeing the wood for the trees, yet the natural beauty of sound is there.
Not that this sound is serene: all breathtaking passages on display come filled with tuneful anxiety, often cinematically anguished but unwaveringly moving; and not for nothing the album’s first single, the relentlessly heavy "One Word That Means The World (Arkhipov)" which deals with the Cuban Missile Crisis, provides impressive common art-rock ground for blues licks and pop sensibilities. Nervousness might set in on the deceptively deadpan “Certainty” which starts the record with an organ-bolstered piano ripple only to witness Galloway’s voice turn impassioned and his guitars soar, but Gatland’s bass notes anchor the entire aural landscape and allow it to pulsate, refracting the groove of the two MGs’ synthesizers through the prism of purest sentiments. Still, whereas “Everything Changed” distills the duo’s assault to riffs and rumble, before wrapping the rhythm into electric dance and liberating a brief electronic solo, the ethereal “Copenhagen” works on a theatrical level, as Malcolm’s vocals go for an almost spoken-word delivery and Mark’s low-frequency performance deepen the overall drama.
However, if “Cause And Effect (But Not Necessarily In That Order)” adds jazzy splashes, trance jive and baroque solemnity to the platter’s instrumental palette, immensely expanding its scope and blending the incongruous textures to create sublime harmonies, and “The Ultraviolet Catastrophe” rolls out a barely reined-in swagger, the record’s titular mini-epic transmogrifies the Brits’ flight of fantasy into a flute-flaunting widescreen adventure. And though “Inside The Atom” heightens the album’s ambience via multilayered arrangement where subliminal patterns tie tangible knots on the listener’s psyche, and “The Think Tank” offers a disturbingly invigorating, nigh-orchestral package of uplift and rage, the chamber ballad “Between Two Worlds” flows quietly towards the twangy, funky “Living With Uncertainty” which twists the finale exquisitely tight. There’s no doubt with regard to this work’s magnificence: “The Uncertainty Principle” is simply great.
*****
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[…] DME review: “A concept album about a scholastic concept might seem repulsive in its meta severity, yet it’s essential for many progressive rock artists to pursue this course, but while lesser mortals would find it irresistible enough to leave their feelings, as opposed to cerebral stance, outside of such record, Mark Gatland and Malcolm Galloway know better than to remove human factors from their music. So, adding half-imaginary storylines to the titular idea, as formulated by Werner Heisenberg about a hundred years ago, and rendering him as a presence on a couple of tracks here, the pair of pals who have been weaving sonics together since their school days infused “The Uncertainty Principle” with emotions without simplifying neither sophisticated arrangements nor lyrical approach. There’s no perceiving the complex theory as not seeing the wood for the trees, yet the natural beauty of sound is there. […]