Immer Für Immer by Flying Moon in Space–Album Review
Immer Für Immer by Flying Moon in Space–Album Review
Leipzig, Germany band Flying Moon in Space is releasing their third album Immer Für Immer (Forever and Always in German) on February 27th. FMIS is vocalist Atom Parks, guitarists Heinrik Rohde, Valentin Bringmann, and Sebastien Derksen (who also moonlights on synth), bassist Sascha Neubert, and drummer Timo Lexau. Members of this lineup had their respective formation in other German ensembles such as Dolphins, Lovely Heroin, Creams, and Holigram Hug! With their previous experience and influences, this collective has crafted rich, complex, and informed modern music.
The album is replete with unexpected BPMs, cortisol-inducing frenetic rhythms, unsyncopated verses, and airplane hangar sounds. We here at Psychedelic Scene had a listen before the big drop, and there are many standouts on the album.
“Drifter” invokes reverberations of Rush’s “YYZ” as if it were on the chop setting of a blender. You might catch a possibly inadvertent nod to The Killer’s “Somebody Told Me,” and it’s tightly wound post-post-punk sentiments. The lyrics to “I Live Where I Want” taunt you with a very Mark E. Smith delivery. And you won’t miss the cascade of double kick drums and the Sonic Youth guitar pile up! It’s two minutes and fifty-two seconds of pure whiplash.
“All That’s Love” lets you catch your breath–if you’re capable of doing so in such a liminal space. The air is dim, but a single kick drum acts as a sort of beacon. Guitars and synths tickle throughout, and as the drums gain their traction, you seem to do so as well. But the song’s crescendo happens when the kick drum transitions into a more consistent splash.
Walther le Kon
You’ll love the B-Movie-informed “We Come in Peace”. The TV is on. Regular programming is long over, and dissonant late-night hollow guitar sounds flicker through the set’s cathode rays.
“Again+Again” could conjure a little Knight Rider at first glance, but then a hollow guitar/bass reveals itself, and it gestures for you to follow it through heavy velvet curtains in this funhouse. A steady Motown beat accompanies. Voices through a monster mic filter proclaim, “I see red,” and now you’ve lost track of which room you’re in. You probably pass multiple distorted portraits of people you don’t know.
But if you can’t wait until the album’s full release on February 27th, then have a listen to track five, “Where Are You?” This centerpiece is intriguing because it has a lot of chapters within. It begins with a violent plunge into a stormy sea. That is the chorus that bashes then rolls and repeats through the vast swells of a blue and grey ocean. Guitars help carry the chorus, and you can virtually taste the gauge of the stainless steel-wound strings. It’s a great hook! The drums are taught with a cranium-tapping high hat that relents with that wave-crashing choral crescendo. The vocals have a sensual timbre that you might have heard before in music by Spacemen 3/ Spiritualized.
You enter a quieter realm as the first verse sets in. It’s a lighter shade of what we’ve just heard, and it is no longer blocking every pore. So now you’ve been brought into a subterranean debriefing room where you brace for some bad news. The vocalist is addressing you from behind a cumbersome metal desk. Behind him, a staccato constellation of deliberately unsyncopated guitars. But there is a shift in the verse, and it feels like the sun is coming out. This happens when an added track of resonating chorus guitars is introduced. But the door closes abruptly, and there’s a chugging, fuzzy interval that slowly runs out of gas, and then Boom!
There’s that chorus again. You’re back out in the vast open sea. There is a lull, and the pitch threatens to change, but it doesn’t. Enter the second half of the song. The vocalist is behind the desk again, and the news seems to be getting better and better, and the roof of this secret bunker begins to lift. That guitar constellation rises up with the ceiling. The vocals fade out as if the man behind the desk is finished here and has levitated. You’re still in the room, but with remnants of that guitar constellation now the retinal imprints of a synth, leaving you with an almost pleasant yellow headache. The song stops abruptly! What happened? Where are you?
Of this track, guitarist Heinrich Rohde explains that the song is about the loss of a great love and a reflection on what happened and where it went wrong. Perhaps that is the person behind the desk debriefing you. But the lightening of the mood in the second half of the song feels, in a sense, like a coming to terms with this great loss.
Flying Moon in Space has concocted a blend of prog, post punk, post and retro-wave in their latest album. There is intriguing timbre and texture throughout, and you are sure to be transported to a stark, frenetic, and gritty realm that you might already be familiar with in your subconscious, especially if you’ve seen Terry Gilliam’s Brazil or Michael Radford’s 1984!
You can hear countless musical influences as each individual member brings the experience of their previous bands to Immer Für Immer. Because of this, there is bound to be something for everyone’s ears!
Riffindots is Britta Pejic. Britta is a musician. Songwriter. Artist. Foreign Language Teacher. Grew up in Maine. Lived in France (The Basque Country). Now back in New England. Enjoys getting lost. Makes a lot of songs at home, puts them into a canister, then into a hatch and then through her own pneumatic tube system under the Atlantic. The songs are vacuumed out the other end, dusted off and polished by Console Lole, her loyal sound engineer back in Basque Country. It’s a system that works well for her. Follow @riffindots for cartoonish fun and visual mayhem or simply enjoy her music at https://brittapejic.bandcamp.com
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