Well, you certainly can’t accuse John Beckmann of being tardy when it comes to releasing music. Hide Inside the Moon comes a mere month after Lost in Space, but if such a release schedule might, in the hands of others, feel like an artist flooding the market or overwhelming the listener, it is the sheer variety and changeable nature of the output that prevent this from happening. More of the same is not a phrase you will ever hear associated with Beckmann and Mortal Prophets.
And the key to keeping things interesting is that each album is based on a theme, an idea, a sense of time and place, and is generically separate from what has gone before. If anything keeps his albums connected, it is the sense of adventure rather than the sound, the creative endeavours and sheer imagination, not the style, genre, or any other paltry pigeon-hole.
So, whilst we have previously found Mortal Prophets exploring everything from scorched blues, trippy groove, no-wave abrasion, or cinematic ambient drift, Hide Inside the Moon takes us to the realm of floating psychedelic dream-pop, but pop that isn’t beholden to any of the usual structural conventions and creative traditions.
“Mad Girls Love Song (Sylvia Path)” is a blend of filmic dream-pop and the sort of delicate touches that made Mercury Rev such a singular sensation, a seductive ebb and flow that seems to create sonic tides under its own internal energy rather than dictated by a set beat.
There are strange, kaleidoscopic arrays, jangling, joyous untethered pop woven of 60’s nostalgia and oriental sonic infusions with “My Future Past,” the title track is dark and atmospheric, spacious and pulsing, the strangely named “I Am a Hermit (Kenneth Anger – Puce Moment)” offers a more conventional moment of beat and groove and melody and “Through Colors” is the sound of a song seemingly melting even as the beats and bounce drive it on!
There is something hallucinogenic running through this album, as if it is a soundtrack to that liminal state between dream and awakening, that disoriented space as consciousness replaces sleep. But whereas that feeling usually lasts only a matter of moments as we become aware of our passage from one to the other, Hide Inside the Moon is the soundtrack to being stuck in such a place. And given the music it features, there are far worse places to find yourself…like the real world, for a start!
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