SURFACE TO AIR

Zombi's second full length album, "Surface To Air" is probably the most impressive work that the band will ever release. Drums, bass, & keyboards will creating a driving force inside your brain! I've been a huge fan of Zombi's music since about 2007, and since then I have bought and listened to just about everything they released, including solo and other projects of the two members of Zombi, Steve Moore & Anthony Patera.

This album offers up a mixture between the soundtracks of Goblin & John Carpenter, along with strong influence from Rush and Tangerine Dream. The bass and drum playing on this album are superb, and you can tell that the members of Zombi are hugely influenced by their personal taste in music.

Zombi works in driving and expanding rhythms, always building up to something grandiose. Some of the songs are more rock oriented, while still maintaining the dependency on sequenced synth lines, but once all the elements fall into place, you can't escape the magic of Zombi's rhythm. And that's what makes this album so fantastic; the driving rhythms keep you engaged, while also allowing you to drift into another place. Their first album "Cosmos" lacked these driving rhythms, and it suffers to some extent because of it.

Each song on this album offers up a treat:

-Challenger Deep is relentless and perhaps the most Goblin sounding song on the album. The bass is super reminiscent of Pignatelli's bass playing in Goblin. On top of that, the synth work is also very Goblin. The drums in this song serve as more of a backbone, with some very nice Neil Peart style drum fills.

-Digitalis bursts out of the gate with an amazing sequenced synth loop, while Patera is slowing building up his metronomic drumming, just waiting to run free beside the sequencer and swirling ambient synth. Slowly, this song becomes a symphony between the drumming and keyboards. It's quite nice.

-Legacy is a track that allows Steve to plays some out of this world bass lines. The song starts with a short and simple keyboard sequence that allows for the bass and drumming to build tension, until is finally breaks free. Along with Challenger Deep, this song would contend for most Goblin influence. The thing about Legacy is, this song reaches soaring heights of pure awesomeness that Goblin rarely ever reached at their best, and this is coming from a huge Goblin fan! This song is the perfect example of Zombi's sound.

-Surface To Air is arguably the best song that Zombi ever made. I know more than a couple people who think so. This song, like Digitalis, bursts out of the gate at full speed. This song features some John Carpenter sounding synth work, but jammed into a rocking song that only lets up in order to blow your mind again.

-Night Rhythms is probably my personal favorite when it comes to this album, and it is probably my favorite thing that Zombi has or ever will do. The song starts with swelling pad synth that sounds reminiscent to a late 70s Vangelis album. Then things take a dark turn when the keyboards start to build a ominous tension and Patera builds a driving tribal drum experience. The song makes you believe it's about to explode, but it only teases you before going into a section of the song that allows anyone familiar with Tangerine Dream to hear the major influence on these musicians. Again, they start to build with sequencers and drumming, when all of the sudden the bass comes slamming in adding a new dynamic as it builds to a dizzying battle between the drumming and driving bass line. We are then again led into a passage that reminds strongly of Pheadra era Tangerine Dream. And once again, the guys start building off of the sequencer until they are pounding into your head during the final moments of the song.

I truly believe this is a masterpiece of music, and that is why I am awarding this album 5 stars. If any Zombi album deserves that honor, Surface To Air is most definitely it.