Fantasmes: Redness Moon
Fantasmes: Redness Moon– There isn’t quite a finger to place on Fantasmes‘ latest Redness Moon. In fact, it’d be a damn shame to put them under any particular umbrella. They groove an ambling lack of direction that’s both mesmerizing and slightly frustrating to the ear at the same time. Take ‘Play It Wrong’… While a fantastically gritty guitar riffs throughout, there’s a faint background hum and gurgle of someone mumbling intermittently throughout. Or the Pink Floyd-esque ‘Passages’ of strung out echoes reverberating through speakers. Even the title track, ‘Redness Moon’ thumps with cult-like infectiousness with vocals smearing all across the song: Mostly unintelligible, but not completely without satisfaction. All Fantasmes really needs are some swaying chicks, shag carpeting, a comfy basement couch and you’ve got the setting for your next forty minutes of musical adventure.
The music melts and flows quite peacefully. This is aided by the groovy reverb, kooky (if not completely unintelligible) lyrics, and tipsy vocals. This album feels like it oozed out of a lava lamp. Redness Moon floats without quite hitting the ease of flight, but rather the jarring and euphoric sense of slow falling. Tracks like ‘Today is Still’ and the aptly titled ‘Cloud Prepositions’ are key examples of this album’s sound. There is something easy to listen to in each track, but an unsettling element as well and that’s what makes Fantasmes a band you should be listening to. Think Animal Collective‘s audio experimentation meets the grandchildren of psychedelic rock. Like any experimental music, it can get downright creepy, especially the final track ‘Tell Me/Nothing is Wrong’. From about the 6:00 mark and on, it’s a soupy mix of backwards playing snippets, creaking wheels and who knows what else. It’s not exactly light listening, but in the right zone, possibly chill inducing.
It’d be easy to write them off as some trippy ’60s throwback; at first this reviewer did that very thing. But there’s a beauty to Redness Moon… A sense of worship easily brushed off as spacey or wacky. As stupid as it sounds, you have to buy into the power of the strange and the dazed feeling this music brings on and while it may not be my most pleasant sip of fresh musical beverage, it’s downright intriguing and worth a second, even third or fourth listen…7/10