SECOND SIGHTING

This album is considered "space" rock, and I like spacey music. For me, this kind of music makes me think of dreamy wanderings among the stars in vast, wide-open interstellar space. But this album, at times, seems more like dodging rocks in a dense asteroid belt. I mean, it is dense. Musically dense. At times there are bass, drums, three guitars, and three keyboard/synth players all playing at the same time, and all apparently mixed to the same 0 dB level. It's kind of like listening to three Oresund Space Collective tracks at the same time. Rarely do I get a passage where one instrument comes forward with a clear expression, while the others drop back in a supporting role. It makes for a thick, impenetrable wall of sound. And if you like structure to your music (verse, chorus, coda, etc), you won't find it here. It's mostly comprised of unstructured grooves, exemplified by tracks that fade into an already established movement, or fade out because there is no defined end. For space rock, I'm okay with that. I'm saying this only to give the potential listener a sense of their compositional style.

But it's not all a dense wall of cluttered music. Tracks 3, 6, 9 and 11 provide room for different musicians to draw you in, and allow you to focus a bit on their personal elaborations. These tracks provide space, both spectrally and temporally, to give a respite from the dense clutter. The work of Greg Kozlowski on sitar (track 9) and EBow'ed guitar (track 11) are highlights of the album, for me.

Judicial application of mixing would go a long way to solving the density issues. That, or simply bench a few musicians on each track to alleviate the aural clutter. Fortunately, there were several bright spots that I enjoyed. Two stars, for collectors/fans only.