Label: Independent
Band: Spaceslug
Origin: Poland
They’ve done it again, those Polish space rockers Spaceslug. After their solid record ‘Time Travel Dilemma’ that came out earlier this year and 2016 endeavor ‘Lemanis’, here is the third album by this band, titled Mountains & Reminiscence. A mighty release that sees these guys steer in a new direction musically.
Surely, Stranger Aeons has covered work of this band before. I loved those records (which you can read here and here) and even had a chat with these gents. This album is even more exciting, for the grand artwork of a glorious mountain (I love rocks) and a sound that seems to have turned more earthy. I’m amazed that these guys still do everything themselves, though it allows for a lot of creative freedom and amazing artwork it seems.
The album opens with the solid, heavy riffs of ‘Bemused and Gone’. Surely, the spacy vibe is still there, but the bass seems more crunchy, dirtier than before. The soaring guitar is still there, but it also seems to have been touched by gravity. The drawled out vocals are in perfect harmony with those guitar parts and create a big soaring feel to the whole music. Where you used to have this cosmic experience, now we’re moving over mountain tops. We’re within the atmosphere on ‘Elephemeral’, with that wonderful wailing guitar.
There’s more distortion and more clashing in the sound, whilst maintaining that particular slow, sluggish vibe that is so typical for the band on a track like ‘Space Sabbath’. The nuances of the sound are more firm and hit home solidly on this amazingly good record. Well, the song is a space song obviously, with fragments of ‘2001: A Space Odissey’ towards the end (the famous HAL interaction). We end on a climactic note with ‘Opposite The Sun’, a track that does embody a certain sense of drama and grandeur that most of the Spaceslug songs lack in their slow progression. It’s nice to see these gents explore their sound further on another fantastic release.