Saturday, September 22, 2012

Hidria Spacefolk- Astronautica (Hidria Music 001)

It has been 5 years since the last Hidria Spacefolk album. The band has played a decent amount of gigs each year and have a new synthesizer player and an additional musician on marimba, vibrafone, and xylosynth for the last 3-4 years. The delay has mainly been due to fatherhood for a number of the members but that has not made the band mellow out in any way. The LP or CD starts off with Ad Astra, an 8 min number. IT has some really intense guitar and synths and very psychedelic mix in this uptempo number. The mid section has a really cool space out.. Wow.. you just float with the beautiful harmony guitars and trip away. The main synth and guitar lines that get repeated are very cool and what a groove…. The track they released as a single back in May called Cycloop is next and probably the track with the heaviest guitar riff the band has ever had! A pretty cool ebo guitar riff and a potent and spacey guitar lead that penetrates the sound and leads the way while Mikko plays the hard guitar riff. The new synthesizer player (Veikko) really plays super cool stuff and Olli on vibraphone also adds a totally new dimension. Plenty of spacey sounds balancing out the heavy guitar riff. Badding, a 12 min song ends the first side of the LP. This starts very spacey with some beautiful guitar and xylophone but then the really groovey bass line kicks in pretty fast. Really melodic and spacey xylophone and keyboards take the main lead while the guitars are more in the background at the start as the track really builds and is very dynamic. The band written more complex and like progressive rock style stuff in this track but they still maintain the killer hypnotic groove and sound they have always had. Very fresh. This next track, Endymion is a killer starting side B of the record with its rock-trance groove and all the layers of spacey stuff going on. I was totally tripping with it sort of eastern groove and the bells. The LP ends with the long 11min track, Seirenes. This has this very intense like vocal chorus synth but also some lead guitar work, more than on the other tracks underneath as the track builds to the mid section, where it changes gears a bit but maintains a very special intensity. Phew.. What an amazing record…. For sure in the top ten this year and available on vinyl and CD.....

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