SCI-FI HI-FI

What an ambitious approach ... 'with their new album EARTHLING SOCIETY have tried to fly higher than pilots have flown' announces their label 4ZERO Records. Well - this might be provided with a funny wink I assume but is expressing an iota of truth at least! The band is back on a spaceship now after the more earthbound cruise through acid psych/folk territories with the predecessor album 'Beauty And The Beast'. What stays is this special sense of melody and the intriguing compositional skills which shows them acting far away from any plain jamming attitude.

Mastermind Fred Laird has formed a modified, well-conditioned crew for the lift-off towards new territories. Keyboardist Joe Orban is back again and responsible for the mellow synthesizer additions all over. Longtime bass player David Fyall is missing this time and substituted by Steve Roberts who cares for the music's solid, mainly grooving fundament along with drummer Jon Blacow. You can detect lots of echoing and heavy psych guitars, distinctive for the space rock genre, besides Laird's vocals which are often appearing slightly modified by diverse effects.

The title song is immediately proving the band's trademark when they are blending catchy as well as way out experimental moments. Groove and melody are really charming where Laird's voice is representing the transition to the weird distorted elements. Tempel Ov Flaming Youth equally carries two faces. The wonderful spacey floating intro makes out an album highlight. After a while though the band changes to a stronger behaviour, even a little bit Hawkwind adopted at the end. And then the tricky EA1729 follows, a damned rocking instrumental thing, gripping, covering an enormous stylistical bandwith and a perfect interaction amongst the musicians. A hot favourite the more I listen to the album.

The acoustic guitar led The Lantern sounds like a retrospect to their former acid psych times where the mellow A Future Dream comes more Pink Floyd/Eloy tinged additionally decorated with nice piano impressions. 'Can you feel the evil of America?' E.V.I.L.U.S.A - the song might be used as a global political statement or is especially referring to the dark side of America's 1960s. Anyhow - here we have a fantastic 20 minutes epic which holds a distinctive neo progressive touch among other things which will please Pendragon fans as well for example.

EARTHLING SOCIETY are hard to predict by all means - therefore it's worth it to wait for every new album. They have reached high altitudes once again in 2009. Offering atmospheric spacey songs provided with a peculiar charm 'Sci-Fi Hi-Fi' is another entertaining piece of work which I can recommend without thought.