Minimalist. This is a short album, around thirty minutes in total split into six chapters, which apparently goes against the normal approach of this Slovakian duo of industrial, dark electronic music. Here they instead favour these slow motion ambient flows where the misty grey musical landscape admits features only in the most understated of manners. A wash of keyboard drone, sometimes barely audible, covers this landscape with the most subtle of ebbs and flows. On occasion these rise to a crescendo but quickly fade back to the whole like languid waves on the most gentle of shores. It imposes a stillness where the most slight of variations become vast spires in comparison. Whilst bearing a certain bleak majesty about it, this is music I would not term dark or frightening; its presence is more imperious, something moving between worlds in deep space with a natural poise and a right to rule without the need to display with anger or violence or petulance. In fact often New Kings And Queens is more about what isn’t there than what is, but each motion cores from the roots off the sound and moves everything when it briefly, quietly comes.
Many of you I don’t doubt would label both review and album as pretentious bollocks if it moved you to any opinion at all, but I find no pretence here at all, no emperor’s new clothes. This is what it is and if it moves you so much the better. For me, this is effortlessly relaxing, thoughtful and thought provoking ambient art. A place to contemplate. Texture and tone wash you gently this way, hint at a current to press you that way but in the end you move through this as you will or you simply float. As a place of drone with only the softest, but still deep movement this is both as simple and as vast as it comes and totally seamless.
Really rather good. If you don’t see the point, then look elsewhere. I’ll be in here for a long while yet.
(8/10 Gizmo)
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