In the eight years since CIRCU5’s debut release, two revelations have come to light. The first Steve Tilling, the driving force of the project, has realized that making an album on your own is a demanding and lonely experience, something that can break a person, which is why the band returns as a fully paid-up trio.
Secondly, if that album’s themes of isolation and manipulation, of shadow organizations pulling the strings of government, and most pertinent of all, exploring the idea of how high-functioning psychopaths getting into positions of ultimate power and shape the world to their will, often seemed the stuff of dystopian sci-fi, as this album continues the story, it doesn’t seem quite so far fetched anymore, thanks to the increasingly dark world that we now see around us.
However, some things have remained the same, and this second album is presented in the same sumptuous approach to packaging as the first, featuring a booklet of beguiling art, lyrics, and information. Also, musically, we find them in the same sonic realms, that place where punchy alt-rock dances deftly with contemporary proggy urges, the perfect balance of punch and poignancy. Only this time, even bigger and cleverer, the sonic choices even smarter, the music even more immediate, even more contagious.
Just listen to the opener, “Make No Sound,” a song that blends big beats and relentless bass drives with an almost pop-infectiousness, mathy guitar runs, and sky-searing highs, all of which are woven together to exact easy and instant accessibility. It is a trick that they have always managed to pull out of the hat, only this time out, said hat feels much deeper, broader, bigger.
“Sing Now” shows just why Steve is no longer going it alone; Mark Kilminster’s intricate bass lines and Lee Moulding’s ornate drum patterns run effortlessly between the funky to the complex to the stacatto as required, the song shifting through changes in dynamic from the ambient to the anthemic as it runs its course.
And so it goes, as we follow the further adventures of Grady, which in turn explores the dark and draconian corners of our own world, we are treated to the metallic blast of “Skin Machine,” the punk-paced yet poised and purposeful title track, the more understated (relatively speaking) “Violet” and the album’s brilliant swansong, “Scars” a reflective soundscape replete with drifting trumpets, layers of guitars that blend the subtle with the supple, the shimmering with the searing, the lilting and the lovely.
Clockwork Tulpa blurs the lines between progressive and alternative rock, between harder sounds and the brilliantly understated. It is the perfect blend of muscle and melody, of grace and grit, and indeed groove, of power and poignancy, of lyricism and literacy.
In short, it is big, and it is clever.
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