Ghoulish Delight
10-01-2009, 11:01 AM
Rank the Swank - Live Music and Albums
http://www.loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/rts/bongosO.gifhttp://www.loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/rts/bongosO.gifhttp://www.loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/rts/bongosO.gifhttp://www.loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/rts/bongosO.gifhttp://www.loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/rts/bongosO_h.gif Overall Swank Rank
Signal Morning
Circulatory System
Psych Folk Rock
Cloud Recordings (http://www.cloudrecordings.com/circulatory.html)
The Lowdown
Almost 8 years after their debut album, the scattered members of the Elephant 6 Collective have reformed as Circulatory System for a second effort. The result is new, edgy, bombastic, slightly unhinged, and all together marvelous. It loses 1/2 point only because they are not bringing their tour to California.
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The Scene
I have been eagerly anticipating this album for a coupl years, when I came across Circulatory System's first album. I credit that album with starting my obsession with modern day psych rock, it's hypnotically good. I was so disappointed to learn that, while all of the members had kept busy with other projects, there hadn't been another Circulatory System album since.
Well, 8 years and it is worth the wait (especially since I only had to wait about 2). I listened to Signal Morning for the first time yesterday and I'm still processing it. It's such a rich, dense work of music.
It retains the dreaminess and airiness of the debut album, but puts it in a context that dispenses with the soothing and relaxing. Of the first album I've long felt that it's a good musical representation of one's mindset after having smoked a lot of weed and taken shrooms. It's a very dreamlike state, with the hallucinogen-induced changes in perception endlessly flowing in front of you. Or at least it is for me.
In the context of that analogy, this album comes about well into that trip, when you've started to come down but are getting a second wind...and so you drop acid. Echoes of the laid back trippiness of the last several hours remain but are drowned out by the harsher edge. The album left me tense, definitely not an album to relax to, nor, as in my case, to listen to while in a car, unable to respond to the imperative to move that this album creates.
And after coming to that conclusion I read this on their website: "An imperative blast of kinetic motion, composed by W. Cullen Hart while in the midst of battling Multiple Sclerosis within his own system." That absolutely comes through in the album, a complete success.
Now, if only they'd book some tour dates west of Chicago!
http://www.loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/rts/bongosO.gifhttp://www.loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/rts/bongosO.gifhttp://www.loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/rts/bongosO.gifhttp://www.loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/rts/bongosO.gifhttp://www.loungeoftomorrow.com/LoT/images/rts/bongosO_h.gif Overall Swank Rank
Signal Morning
Circulatory System
Psych Folk Rock
Cloud Recordings (http://www.cloudrecordings.com/circulatory.html)
The Lowdown
Almost 8 years after their debut album, the scattered members of the Elephant 6 Collective have reformed as Circulatory System for a second effort. The result is new, edgy, bombastic, slightly unhinged, and all together marvelous. It loses 1/2 point only because they are not bringing their tour to California.
__________________________________________________
The Scene
I have been eagerly anticipating this album for a coupl years, when I came across Circulatory System's first album. I credit that album with starting my obsession with modern day psych rock, it's hypnotically good. I was so disappointed to learn that, while all of the members had kept busy with other projects, there hadn't been another Circulatory System album since.
Well, 8 years and it is worth the wait (especially since I only had to wait about 2). I listened to Signal Morning for the first time yesterday and I'm still processing it. It's such a rich, dense work of music.
It retains the dreaminess and airiness of the debut album, but puts it in a context that dispenses with the soothing and relaxing. Of the first album I've long felt that it's a good musical representation of one's mindset after having smoked a lot of weed and taken shrooms. It's a very dreamlike state, with the hallucinogen-induced changes in perception endlessly flowing in front of you. Or at least it is for me.
In the context of that analogy, this album comes about well into that trip, when you've started to come down but are getting a second wind...and so you drop acid. Echoes of the laid back trippiness of the last several hours remain but are drowned out by the harsher edge. The album left me tense, definitely not an album to relax to, nor, as in my case, to listen to while in a car, unable to respond to the imperative to move that this album creates.
And after coming to that conclusion I read this on their website: "An imperative blast of kinetic motion, composed by W. Cullen Hart while in the midst of battling Multiple Sclerosis within his own system." That absolutely comes through in the album, a complete success.
Now, if only they'd book some tour dates west of Chicago!