A benevolent avalanche of sonic goods from Eat Lights Become Lights, Mildred Maude, Good Shepherd, Melinda Bronstein and Stellarays

Although smaller independent parts of the music industry are certainly being squeezed into difficult logistical and economic corners right now, plenty of things are still finding their way out in all directions stylistic and physical against the odds. As the below bundle of releases attests…

Despite being particularly bruised by manufacturing delays of late, Dom Martin’s Polytechnic Youth label is, at time of writing, on course to deliver one of its strongest vinyl long players of 2021, in the shape of The Romance of the Stars from Eat Lights Become Lights.

Whilst it’s taken lead light eater Neil Rudd Branquinho the best part of five years to deliver a studio sequel to 2017’s Nature Reserve, it’s certainly been worth the wait. Steering heavily into more elaborate kosmische-ambient avenues and distancing itself from rest of the current PY roster, this could be the best and most sophisticated Eat Lights Become Lights full-length to date.

Side A’s trio of tracks make for an entrancing seamless suite; shifting through the glistening Steve Reich-meets-Snow Palms repetitions of “Last Train to Kanyakumari”, the pirouetting piano gentility of “Memories of Spain (And the Gods Looked Down)” and the eerie Apollo-era Brian Enoisms of “My Love For You Didn’t Die… But My Heart Had to Move On”. However, it’s the sublime 23-minute flipside of “The Romance of the Stars (Parts I, II & III)” that gives the record both its gravitas and grooves, as it glides through barely-there sparsity, awe-inducing orchestral lavishness, a masterful motorik breakout and almost back again.

In short, Romance of the Stars undoubtedly validates another Polytechnic Youth fight to get an album through a pressing plant… and then some.

Similarly unabashed in the scope of its expansiveness but from a far grittier guitar-bass-drums direction is Sleepover from Cornwall’s Mildred Maude. The trio’s second album – and their first for the increasingly infallible Sonic Cathedral – was almost completed as a band prior to the March 2020 lockdown and finished remotely over the ensuing months. Built almost entirely around the improvisations of guitarist Matt Ashdown, bassist Lee Wade and drummer Louie Newlands, also like the aforementioned Eat Lights Become Lights LP the collection positions three tracks of varying duration at its start and one super-long cut at its end.

Whilst the touchstones might be fairly obvious to those of us who came of proper record-collecting age in the 90s, the threesome clearly have a chemistry that prioritises intuitiveness over nakedly-displayed influences.

Therefore, “Trevena” acts as a terrific ten minute introduction, with its transmogrified blend of Slowdive yearning and bursts of Loveless scree. Contrastingly in its wake, “Chemo Brain” crunches itself down into less than three minutes of chugging skronk, that feels like a Yo La Tengo rehearsal room recording circa Electr-O-Pura. More sprawl returns with the ethereal fuzz of “Elliott’s Floor”, that puts plangent FX-pedalling into metallic Sonic Youth string-bending. It’s with the twenty-minute finale of “Glen Plays Moses” where all the preceding threads intertwine into one cavernous ear-enveloping epic, stuffed with swirling and clanking guitar lines, pulsing bass and pummelling drums.

It appears overall then, like sort-of-labelmates Spectres, that Mildred Maude are a band of sonic brothers for whom channelling together the collective noise-memories of their youth into fresher uncompromising forms is something that simply has to be done for their shared sanity, regardless of whether anyone is ready to listen. Thankfully though, outside ears with a fondness for intelligent free range racket-making should be more than welcome to join the Mildred Maude fraternity with Sleepover.

With top-draw outings from the interconnected A Lilac Decline, Loner Deluxe and Cubs, Galway’s Rusted Rail has been on a serious roll recently, in healthily recooking-up with vintage 1990s-to-2000s indie-rock, post-rock, Americana and leftfield folk ingredients.

Although geographically separated from the main family of the imprint’s artists, Duncan Poyser’s one-man Good Shepherd enterprise extends upon the shared Rusted Rail philosophies beautifully with Let’s See What the East Wind Brings… There is though an extra time-discombobulating twist. The gathered compositions were actually cut between 2005 and 2010 at home in Cambridge and some previously slipped out on early rare Rusted Rail 3” CD EPs.

Assembled largely alone, on an 8-track Tascam recording set-up and beautifully tiered with acoustic and electric guitars, woozy harmonica, keyboards, low-slung bass, rudimentary percussion, self-mirrored vocals and oddments, Let’s See What… draws you into a hermetic bubble as if it were a compilation of sublime outtake pieces rescued from a Louisville back porch, an instrument-cluttered Chicago loft space, a chilly Duluth living room and a dimly-lit New York bedsit.

Hence, there is fragmentary folk akin to Papa M’s Whatever, Mortal, nods to the murkiest minimalist segments of the Codeine catalogue (“The Beast” and “Slow Down”), shades of Rivulets and early Songs: Ohia (“Sunday Morning Son” and “Good Today”), hints of Will Oldham’s formidable formative Palace recordings (“There is a Mountain”) and glances back to the quietest Lullaby for the Working Class moments (“Sing Again”).

Whether Duncan Poyser was ever actually in thrall to any such touchstones at the time of original recording is unclear but they somehow seeped into the somnambulant DNA of Let’s See What the East Wind Brings… with a warming ease, to communally forge an intimate melancholic masterstroke.

Equally the product of self-isolationist recording arrangements, albeit government-mandated by pandemical living, is In Reverse, the debut solo album from Melinda Bronstein (co-curated by the Objects Forever and Metaphysical Powers labels). Best known previously for her work in The Leaf Library and as the co-leader of Sea Glass, Bronstein has fashioned an elusive sequence of songs here, set inside DIY dreamscapes.

Constructing sonic beds with piano, organ, other assorted keyboards, violin, loops and drones, in which her crystalline yet eerily layered tones are interwoven, the cassette/digital affair unpeels as an enigmatically mesmeric affair.

Along the way this means flowing through gauzy incantations-shrouded ghostliness reminiscent of Julianna Barwick (“Still/Time” and “From/Love”); claustrophobic choral repetitions (“Love/Anyone”); glitchy latter-day Low-like abstractions (“Dream/Death”); disembodied doo-wop (“Something/Lost”); atonal swarming vocals (“Make/Love”); and a lo-fi take on the haunted piano-led starkness of PJ Harvey’s White Chalk (“Taking/You”).

Whilst certainly not an easy listen in places, there is nevertheless something subtly arresting about In Reverse, that finds a reliable team player starting to also command an impressive self-lit solo space.

With the delivery of their stunning space-psych-pop-carnival odyssey debut LP, Cosmopollinators, which appeared earlier this year as part of Castles in Space’s subscription series, Portugal’s Stellarays have already marked themselves out as an intoxicatingly distinctive operation. Whilst L’Orchestra Pop Le Stelle (Modern Aviation) doesn’t quite hit the same musical motherlodes as its predecessor, it’s still another alluring addition to this mysterious group’s promising canon.

Eschewing the more vocal/song-based approaches of Cosmopollinators, in favour of predominantly shorter and virtually wordless vignettes, this lower-key sequel selection is seeped in sumptuous arrangements that are initially hard to place in their sources of inspiration. With time however, it’s possible to spot some satisfying historical yet uncontrived reference points.

Thus, to be found are flavours of the lusher Richard Wright-led corners of Pink Floyd’s Zabriskie Point soundtrack blended with the otherworldly passages of the same band’s Saucerful of Secrets LP (“Ocean Breeze”); the spectral unearthiness of abandoned French fairgrounds fed through D. Rothon’s studio filters (“Soirée a Flic en Flac”); distant balmy ripples of the peerless Another Green World (“Pendulum Bird” and “Trioscope Focus”); imaginary long-lost Delia Derbyshire scores (“Octopus Lens” and “Lost TV Tape”); droplets of Ralf und Florian (“Électronique Pour Les Étoiles”); and affectionate yet lateral salutes to early-Broadcast (“Trama Nella Metropoli”).

Offering up different things with each airing, L’Orchestra Pop Le Stelle reconfirms Stellarays as an ensemble capable of conjuring-up some very special sounds indeed. More soon please…

Adrian
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