Not too many modern day artists who openly wear their influences on their sleeves are able to transcend those influences. Their music might be fun (nothing wrong with that), and their desire to rekindle or celebrate the past laudable (I sure as hell have aesthetic and musical feet firmly planted in the 1970s), and maybe it’s just another variant of the folk thing, an unending chain in which progenitors hand their mantles to those in the next generation willing to accept and wear them, but I’ll be damned if Spiral Galaxy don’t upset the whole apple cart.
Cosmic rock. Motorik beats. Verbed out flute. Pulsing electronic drones. Krautrock staples, right? Absolutely. Krautrock, perhaps more than any other genre or movement or moment in music, has exerted an almost eerie staying power. Its pervasiveness is the opposite of punk’s. Rather than strike head on, it worms its way in through cracks and crevices, lingers in the dark corners of the grand musical box, and exerts its influence from behind the veil. Until…
…along comes a band of exemplars whose exhaustive knowledge of the genre (I’m looking at you Steve Krakow) works like a Zen koan: once one knows all, and hears all, and absorbs all, one is free to forget all of the noise and get down to the business of creating, unfettered. And that’s just what this merry band do on their sophomore effort.
If, like me, you are a huge fan of the first Spiral Galaxy album (and how!), you’d arrive at II with a certain set of expectations. How could you not? II plays in the same sandbox as I. They both favor near side-long cosmic excursions, employ similar instrumentation, and draw from the same rich source material.
Yet, I is colder than II, by a longshot. Cold in the way that a Heldon record is cold (it isn’t a bad thing, merely an aesthetic choice). I, is a cold war vibe. A Solaris vibe. An In the Dust of the Stars vibe. Very East Berlin. In fact, very Brigid Berlin. Warhol would have favored this iteration of the band, I suspect.
II is different. It is waaaaaarrrrrrrm. Burning star core warm. Simply put, the record is plain gorgeous. Like, stunningly, hair-raisingly so. From the album art (thank you main players Plastic Crimewave and Sarah Gossett) and the album’s opening flute strains (again, thank you Sarah) to the closing string arrangements, II is unrelenting in its ability to conjure the beatific. Not many artists sit firmly in that rarefied air. Mike Oldfield with Hergest Ridge side two? Yes. And that’s good company to be in, for sure.
