This is Asteroid No.4's tenth album of space rock from this band who are now based at there own studio in San Rafael California. I like many people first heard them covering Spacemen 3's Losing Touch With Your Mind on the Spacemen 3 tribute album a good long while ago. Any band that has the Rain Parade and Spacemen 3 as key influences will always be alright with this obsessive fan of both bands.
The album opens with All Mixed Up that really reminds me of Nectarine no.9 or even Wild Crash 500, the latter of which is as obscure a reference as they come I realize, as they were a very short lived early 90's band who once supported Peter Perrett very memorably way back then, to come up with a very cool spaced indie song.
Hand Grenade has some very Rosco style drums and a one or two note pulse on a song that sounds indebted to Soul 1 or Ecstasy Symphony and should probably be heard at monumentally deafening volume to properly warp your minds as it detonates in your brain.
Paint it Green is a sweet vocal wrapped in a sonic cocoon and a guitar part that is riffing off of what Robert Fripp brings to Heroes as the cymbals crash through your brain, the vocals are a bit Soul Kiss Glide Divine in places too.
No One Weeps re-works a classic garage rock riff to great echo laden effect like one of Boatclub's dark parts the explosive bits of Never gonna Let You Down, but a great wonky tune.
I Don't Care is more like House Of Love or Chapterhouse, when they were in focus at least, either way this is just a rather fine jangly anthem with some spectral guitar that's getting attacked by a tambourine.
Juniper has a cool bass motif running through it against the echo chamber vocals and deranged guitar attacks in places it’s like Drop Nineteens and the less slack end of Archers Of Loaf this has that early 90's college rock vibe down perfectly, like your seeing bands at the University of London Union, or the London School Of Economics that always had bands that sounded a bit like this to me playing at them, as I hope Colleges around the world will do again soon.
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Stardust is fast like a supernova crossing the sky with the odd descending part making you feel like they are crashing down, from this thrill ride they are on, as that stardust alters their brains, with vocals that remind me a bit of Euros Child from Gorky's Zygotic Mynci.
The album closes by wrapping your brain in a Swiss Mountain Myth that swirls like your in a Leslie like snow storm of reverberation that is comforting and deeply familiar almost from the first listen it glows and hums and brings things to a lovely luscious end. It took me four listens to this album to really let it get to me, but the more I hear it the better it gets, as you notice more of what's going on, also the louder the better, as these songs benefit from hearing everything going on properly.
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