Swedish rockers The Soundtrack Of Our Lives bowed out last year, and since then frontman Ebbot Lundberg has gone back to his psychedelic, avant-garde roots with his latest project. Along with new bandmates, Per Svensson, Mats Gustafsson and Patrick Kaganis, he recorded this album at Europe’s oldest megalithic monument.
You wonder what the norse gods will have made of opening track Solar Eclipse, which consists chiefly of Revolution 9-style cacophony, screaming, thunder as well as dark pronouncements about the ‘smothering the light’. Not the smoothest of introductions, but it’s just the start of a five-track sonic arc that will peak halfway through the album with the slow-building mystical anthemics of the title track.
Either side of it are some agreeably scuzzy chunks of garage twang and echoey psych. Lundberg’s waving-or-drowning vocals battle with brooding bass undercurrents and swirling maelstroms of sound, before the slow, druggy 24-minute mystical meltdown of ETB lowers us slowly back into the pit of noise, starting at the barmier end of The Doors’ back catalogue and getting darker by the minute.
A mind-altering ride.
