BALSAMIC GARDEN - THE OCEAN- Rhenium Records release

First track "continent" opens with crashing reverb guitar strikes, slow languid things that drip you down into an acid western opium den. guitar continues, serpentine, american noir, shrugging off shy shallow snare n cymbal strikes, a slinking tomcat pushing nose into air defiant of time. the opioid groove is enough to push you back in your seat. several minutes into the eight minute-plus track i realize i've heard this somewhere before... neil young's soundtrack to "dead man" i think. by then the pure narcotic bliss induced has rendered me too ecstatic to consider whether its an homage or a rip-off. if hedonism itself could be transferred into a musical number, this track would take up a large chunk of the playing time.
second track "diving" comes off inversely-appropriately-

titled; the quiet ambiance quietly embraces you as if you've started off from the bottom of a cousteau dive and are very slowly bubbling up through mollusks and jellyfish towards a surface too distant to quite catch a glimpse of. the sounds defy a clarification of instrumentation, though i suspect it continues to be a guitar-delay-reverb combination. closing my eyes, i easily picture myself floating either through sea or space, or at least listening to the most appropriate planetarium soundtrack ever recorded. oh so quiet echoes begin to bleed through, sounding like nothing quite so much as pensive whale calls, a mother mourning the untimely demise of one or more young.
third track "chasm" organically flowed into via the basic themes of the first two, vastness, oceans and deserts, universal void. after the introduction it breaks away from the motif. the first overt signs of mechanical tinkering are heard, distinct pedal oscillation contrasting against earlier organic effects alchemy. the voice of a southern church leader drifts out of the abyss, extolling at length the virtues of christianity and states' rights circa civil war, restrained in accent but not in ideology. momentarily bile rises in my throat at the sound of a confirmed enemy, but as the preacher's voice fades and is replaced by the cries of gulls i smile. i sense, i hope that this ending intends to imply what i personally draw from it: "the ocean" intimately confirms the futility of myopic, miasmal human thought patterns in the face of an infinitely complex universe.

-CJ