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As elegant as Sigur Ros.
As cinematic as godspeed you black emperor.
As chilling as Mum.
As stately as Yellow 6.
Maybe you are in love, that buzz feeling flitting around your senses like some kind of charging dynamo making you impervious and whole, allowing to walk as if on air.
Maybe you’ve split up from a relationship, the wounds still open, the days appearing painfully long with each passing sunrise, the nights ever more lonely, the sense of loss ever more hurting.
‘Garmonia’ understands those opposing emotions, within its delicate treads it plays sparring partners to the loved and offers a shoulder to cry for the unloved.
Recently found touring with the likes of Mogwai and Papa M, Lights out Asia born from former members of Aurore Rien evoke heart aching grandeur on a colossal scale. ‘Garmonia’ is their debut album and if you think the names bandied around at the beginning of the review where merely some sort of casual attention grabbers, then think again, long and hard.
Lights out Asia create absorbing crystalline ambient symphonies that serenade docile trip hop beats to create longing atmospherics, a place of melting melodies to make the heart wander, curvaceous stuff that skips discreetly across the pools spacerock, electronica and post rock and which smoothly, with the speed of a blinking of the eye, draw you in to romance, invigorate and leave you dumbstruck at the spectral haze with which they softly smother you within. It’s all about poise and creating moods.
‘Garmonia’ at eleven tracks in length is deeply personal, it’s a private thing that’s intimately cast mostly with a meditive glaze, opening with the glacial like ‘Knock Knock’ which suggestively flickers with all the luminescence of a fairy tale grotto clutching to its inner warmth an exotic cocktail of tingling pianos, playground babble and echoing sound scapes. ‘You’re all on display’ dips in tempo, pensively wrapped around tantalising clockwork mechanics that gathers in stature a though initially frozen and now slowly melting in the glare of a rising sun, try thinking Boards of Canada on a polar expedition with Ryuichi Sakamoto. We could also mention the charged enchantment of the sophisticated drama unravelling within ‘Hail Russia’ the closest point at which the ensemble go head to head with GSYBE, or marvel at ‘Not every day’s a victory’ where it’s as though your ushered in to see Slowdive at full tilt weaving their celestially formed melancholia but then if you needed any affirmation we’d point you in the direction of ‘Promontory / Cemetery’. Despite its seemingly doom laden title is simply stupefying, slyly caught between simplistic spellbinding grooves that subtly nod towards Yousou N’Dour and formed from the same stuff that holds heavenly bodies together, beautiful simply isn’t a description that truly does it justice.
MARK BARTON
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