Having already sampled two singles from Ornament, the debut album from Morten Alsinger’s Tralalas, it seemed a given thing that I would find lots to like from this long-awaited, long-player. And this, indeed, proves to be the case: if a single’s job is to give the listener a sonic snapshot of the album to follow, let us sample and decide if it is to our taste, then they have certainly fulfilled their obligations.
As “Burns,” the most recent of those two singles, kicks the album off, I find myself falling for his dark and delicious, apocalyptic, post-punk-scape all over again. Not that the music necessarily sounds too much like anything I have heard before, but it does connect a lot of dots in my record collection with its fractured, Bauhaus-ian soundscape, Tom Waits howl, and eerie energies.
“Hinterlands” wanders between the dark and direct and deliriously delirious and stomping glam-goth grooves. “Moon and Head” builds a bridge between ’60s dream-pop (if ever there was such a thing) and later revivalists such as Echo and the Bunnymen’s languid and liquid guitars. And “Stone in a Well” sounds like a Lou Reed track melting in real time before your very ears. (I’m not sure what that means, it just feels right!)
Those two singles promised much. Ornament delivered more than I could have hoped for. Don’t you love it when that happens?
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