SUNRISE AURANAUT – The Ocean Of Unspoken Words

Rock Company 2017

SUNRISE AURANAUT –
The Ocean Of Unspoken Words

Navigating the course from serenity to storm, Russian ensemble search for sweet escape.

Still a solo project, SA’s fourth album sees Vitaly Kiselev veer off a one-man endeavor to turn it into a duo and delegate a good deal of his guitar’s melodic load to Alexander Malakhov’s ivories, which elevated the Dmitrov dwellers’ progressive leanings to a heavenly swell. As the record’s title may suggest, there’s no need for vocals when pop-tinctured pieces like “The Last Meeting” seem to conceal inner voices, while rougher drums render the otherwise blissful “Free Wind And Home Draft” rather adventurous.

Commencing with classical piano and spaced-out synthesizers of “Perseids” and landing on “Late Night Is Early Morning (After The Holiday)” where the drift is more down-to-earth but equally riveting, the pair’s nimble fingers weave a theatrical tapestry of moods that somehow eschew latent heaviness – outlined by dramatic organ and riffs of “In A Room With Many Mirrors” – in favor of lighter delights. That’s the cosmos that the title epic is striving to occupy by spreading orchestral ripples across a solemn, if rock-laden, landscape, although the brisk “The Great Dumb (Cinema)” has a tinseltown superficiality to it.

Some of these numbers could be turned into songs, yet the album’s, and the project’s, concept wouldn’t allow such development. As it is, the direction they’re moving in feels right.

***3/4

June 15, 2018