So with Mastodon’s newest genre-bending long-player hot off the press and filling our stomachs with meaty melodies, their drummer/backing vocalist, Brann Dailor, has seen it fit to offer us up a side-helping of psychedelic, synthetic electronica. That boy is a goddamn machine!. Joining forces with him, his Arcadea bandmates are Withered/Scarab guitarist Raheem Amlani and Zruda/Gaylord guitarist/keyboardist Core Atoms. Is it a good taste combo, though?
Well, this self-titled debut album sure is acerbic – the citrus kick to cut through the starchy bulk, perhaps? It’s bursting with solid, driven drum beats and warm, warbling electronica underpinning echoic, splintering multi-part vocals. So, brace yourself for more futuristic stories; these ones of exploding planets and warring galaxies overseen by the last of the surviving space wizards. Or, as the PR blurb puts it, “an infinite transmission from the event horizon”.
From the soft, Floydian drift of “Neptune Moons” or “Through The Eye Of Pisces” (complete with vocoder) to the rumbling Wakeman-esque, monolithic crush of “Gas Giant” you’ll be whisked on an alien journey so intensive that you simply cannot ignore it. It’s that little kid kicking your shins or the fire alarm blasting forth, assaulting your eardrums until you evacuate. It’s certainly not a background album that can be subliminally enjoyed – it’s just too vibrant, jerky and obnoxious. If Arcadea were a colour, they’d be day-glow.
Listen carefully and you’ll be able to pick out a few doozies. “Motion Of Planets” mixes up the vocal delivery to pump out rap and disenchanted spoken word. It sounds not unlike The Prodigy battling The Streets in outer space. “The Pull Of Invisible Strings” tears a leaf out of Devin Townsend’s book and pumps as much sound into its run-time; not just leaving dead air to a minimum, but making sure at least three arpeggios are firing off at differing angles at any one time. The layers are mind-bendingly dense, so similar to each other that you’ll go mad trying to pick them apart.
Repeated plays will allow the conceptual mass to sink in fully – and with familiarity comes deep appreciation of the amount of intense production work that must have gone in to clean this bad boy up. It zings. The great Jean-Michel Jarre’s jaw would drop at this. “Through The Eye Of Pisces” is an instantaneous joy to listen to, but the rest of the album will require quite a bit of work to absorb, In short, it’s a grower. Don’t listen and discard – give it a chance; you will be handsomely rewarded.
(7.5/10 John Skibeat)
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