TIGHTLY UNWOUND

To date, "Tightly Unwound" is The Pineapple Thief's second-most-complex and second-most-beautiful album. It can be called a kind of watershed between the conventionally early (heavy and minimalist) and mature (melodic and fully- fledged) periods. And it feels like a fast-paced rise in mastery. Here, in principle, there is not even the slightest hint that the disc is "mediocre". Music sounds beautiful, thoughtful, powerful and colorful. At the same time, it is not devoid of improvisational intonations, coupled with electronic avant-garde. The album seems to be recorded in one breath - in the best traditions of LED ZEPPELIN. He absorbed the best moments of both classics of the genre and contemporaries, while remaining in a trendy key.

Composition Different World seems to float in the clouds, dipping the listener into crystal sadness. Dizziness. While listening, you get the feeling that you have returned to distant childhood and began to rotate on the carousel for a long time, catching blurry sun glare with your eyes, when you are happy and do not know what to do (this is what the song says). And the melodiously regretful acoustic The Sorry State, with hysterical and warm vocals that mockingly heralds someone's downfall. Then the middle is interrupted by a hard rock guitar and "ricky-ticky" drums.

And the most important "So Say All Of You" is one of PT's coolest and most pushful songs, which should be included in 10 platinum songs of neo-prog since 1991. Incredible lyrics and a gloomy, hysterical, almost crying voice, as if tearing into an abyss and apocalyptic, like a burning sunset, mellotrons, coupled with cold hard drums and distorted guitars. All this creates an amazing feeling of falling into the abyss, while done so masterfully and voluminously that it becomes a little creepy. And at the end of the 14-minute epic "Too Much Too lose", which I do not recommend listening to alone. The beginning is quite positive and non-binding - it can make you fall asleep, but by the middle of the composition, the music is flooded with such eerie and ominous notes that it can fit into a terrible art house. In the future, all this gradually develops into a tough psychedelic apocalypse, with incredible guitar and drum sketches. It's like early Pink Floyd merged with Muse, only on a subtler path.

In other words, the album allows you to transfer the group from the category of "second-rate" to rock monsters: gentle, beautiful, melodic and dark, cruel, aggressive, complex in one bottle. As befits thinkers from prog music.