SEQ 2020
Tree
English ethereal duo ground their art in here and now to highlight the roots and branches of the sounds the two make.
Looks like it’s all about time with this London’s ensemble: their eponymous debut seemed to explore the future and sophomore offering delved into the past, yet “Tree” packs the present in the record’s grooves. Still, if "Children Of The Stones" exuded, slowly and surely, unadulterated glee, the little group’s third platter wraps the listener’s experience in doubt – otherwise, why Nick Adams and Peter Jeal saw fit to append a question mark to the album’s finale, and made the clanging funk of “Joy?” a backdrop to a synthesized flight towards the great unknown? However, the piece’s cosmic landscape is caressed by quasi-acoustic strum as solemn waves wash over the increasingly hectic, and alluring, dancefloor which will vanish in nothingness, whence opener “Transmitter C” originally emerged.
The signals it sends to reverberate throughout these seven cuts – either free and easy or shrouded in hazy effects – are arresting when they embrace organ-delivered grandeur and bounce out of celestial realms before Jeal’s crystalline ivories get drowned in Adams’ strings until emotional and orchestral balance is struck. The instrumental soaring begins afresh – only to be fractured, Fripp-way, once the looped figures of “Triskel” try to undermine the number’s meandering melody and, failing do that, surrender to the freedom of jazzy piano. But the same specters turn romantic for “Campfire” to pour space patterns into folk motifs and for “Rain” to acoustically evoke a damp daydream.
The reverie is bound to become a full-fledged cinematic drift in the 10-plus minutes of mesmeric “Like Katriona” which feels almost abstract in places, yet instead reveals a motorik throb in its veins and expands its dynamic amplitude to scale a progressive, riff-laden and slider-kissed scope. As a result, nebulosity flows further, to “Weird Science” whose spars lines can carry one’s mind away, where time doesn’t matter. As a matter of fact, this should direct SHINING PYRAMID to untrodden routes and shine a new light on them.
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