Spatial Moods - Cae un Mito (2019)

Country: Peru
Style: Psychedelic Rock
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 13 Aug 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube

Peru is quickly becoming my surprising country to go to for quality new rock and metal. Sorry, Greece, you're not surprising enough any more (but I still love you). Spatial Moods are an interesting psychedelic rock band with a lot of space rock in their sound and enough prog rock that I keep on hearing the strains of 21st Century Schizoid Man in Anime, un Mito.

I liked the opener, Mar de Escorpio, but Anime, un Mito found its groove at the outset, stalking and swaggering and then adding a very surprising vocal from Jorge Apaza Frisancho that sets up an interesting contrast. It's high and sweet and delicate and it's deliberately buried in the mix, which has a particular fondness for bass and guitar. It rocks on out, but too quickly as this is the shortest song on the album, albeit at five and a half minutes.

The rest are seven minute jams, 333 especially, given that it doesn't seem to have any particular destination in mind. It's best towards the end when it gets all playful. I could imagine the band creeping quietly over a stage in Victorian nightshirts, teasing the audience, only to face them and rock out again. I liked it a lot but I'm not sure if those couple of minutes had anything to do with those that went before.

Besitos de Hormiga starts out like a Satanic lounge band wondering if their audience will be OK with them playing Dazed and Confused but never actually getting to the point of doing so. The bass is ready but the guitar has some introspective quest to complete first and, by the time that it shows back up in the same reality, the band has moved on.

I enjoy this album greatly. I must do because I had it on repeat all through the night while I worked on a convention program book. There are wild hordes of sounds here rampaging through this album that I appreciate. I'm just not entirely sure if any of the songs come off sounding remotely coherent. And, without that coherence, the album shifts from tracks I enjoy to tracks that aren't going to play in my head later.

I ended up concluding that, as the band's name suggested from the beginning, they're more interested in exploring moods than writing songs. Amancaes, for instance, begins with each of the four band members playing different songs that just happen to be entirely compatible. A wild cacophony brings them to some sort of agreement as to how to proceed. It's a fascinating track. And, after it seems to lose the plot completely, it wraps up beautifully in sync.

For sound, it wouldn't hurt to think of early King Crimson as a stoner rock band being booked to play a jazz club and shifting up accordingly every now and then so as to not lose the gig. It's a great album to set running in the background while you're working, knowing that it'll grab your attention at a completely different point every time.