The opening track bewilders, as those wings open. Skittering analog patterns and swooping, drooping drones, giving way to unexpected distorted vocals and unknown blossoms of texture and tone. It's an exciting start.
But over the next 6 tracks, numbness sets in. The same arpeggios and voices are joined by horns and looping reeds and swooping flutes, amounting to nothing. Not a thing connects, it all sounds arch, arty, detached.
It's like you've entered a magical garden, and you gasp as the gates open onto a new world. But it becomes clear that all the strange plants; breathing, pulsing, ejecting pollen; could not be less interested in you. And you think they're cool, kinda. But you're a meaningless technicality on a closed system that will chug along without you forever ; ; alienating ; ; compelling only on the most intellectual level.
Exception for the closing 11-minute epic though, a track that finally brings some sweep and scope and uplift and energy, evoking late-sequence Dan Deacon tracks, with tones that finally seem to be willing to engage with you and fly through your centers that trigger your actual feelings.
It's frustrating to have such compelling bookends on such a soulless core. Smith clearly has talent, but seems swept up in living up to some abstract notion of artfulness that undermines her ability to make human music 3/5
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