A bit of psych rock here from the only band I’ve ever encountered with a semi colon in their name. Not sure what the IRSE is about but I doubt it stands for the Institute of Railway Signal Engineers. Band names apart, Finland’s Kairon; IRSE! have been disseminating spaced out stuff since 2014.
Whoooosh … to the backdrop of a calming drum pattern we are taken away into fluffy clouds. Cleverly “Psionic Static” speeds up and as disconnected souls provide a distant chorus, a grungy instrumental line provides a hard edge. We float on the edge of time. I guess this is the claimed “chainsawing alternative guitar fuzz of My Bloody Valentine, the sparkle and dreamscape of Slowdive”. The real point is that our mission is out there in space beyond the clouds. A shadowy electro rhythm marks the distorted avant-garde approach of “Retrograde”. The dreamy vocal chorus makes this colourful and occasionally noisy world seem like it’s not real, which it isn’t, and from the haziest part of our imagination. The keyboard player has a strong influence. The drummer is busy and electric rock rings forth. Our journey continues with “Welcome Blue Valkyrie”. There’s definitely some 70s prog pomp about all this, which has no doubt led to comparison with King Crimson. But commendably this doesn’t sound like anything. “Welcome Blue Valkyrie” has melancholic depth and as ever the vocals come from the clouds. Light and dark, waves drift across our horizon in front of us like stars through the night. After “An Bat None”, which I felt was an amalgam of the other pieces, our senses are shaken with the hymn “Mir Inoi”. The keyboard plays a steady tune like raindrops falling, but it’s the soft and mystical expanse which captures the imagination and encourages us to dream. It was only at the start of “Altaär Descends” that I realised that the vocalist sounds a lot like the Beach Boys’s Brian Wilson. The only surfing going on here though is on the clouds. Again, the electro beat calms us, before intensifying and presenting a buzzing deeper face with harmonies to match. To end, the imaginary spacecraft lands, taking us into the ceremonial “Hypnogram”. The rhythm strangely reminded me of a bagpipe tune. But this is keyboard-driven. As often with expansive keyboard pieces, there’s an air of the theme tune for an adventure series about it. And it’s very 70s as is much of this well-produced psychedelic journey. There’s a nice transformation to the dynamic “White Flies”. We’re flying now. It’s kind of pop, and always has that electro heartbeat but above it’s a fun, dreamy, heart-warming track, well for me anyway. And so to the concluding title track. Strangely it didn’t have a special impact but it was ok. There’d been plenty to feature on here.
Enjoy the dreamy ride through space. I did.
(8.5/10 Andrew Doherty)
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