A Journey Across the Mojave
Psychedelic rock is often a tough nut to crack. The genre is so broad and expansive that it becomes like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. The upside is that every so often you reach your hand into the box and pull out something truly unique and engaging. On The Myrrors deliver exactly that through a unique blend of influences that reflect their life and surroundings in stunning detail.
The album slowly winds in with the ambient, almost field recording-esque “Mountain Morning” which calls to mind exactly what it should, the sound of crickets and birds exchanging conversations as the wind rustles the brush on a Mojave mountainside. The brass section slowly comes to life halfway through the song serving as a segue between “Mountain Morning” and “Liberty is in the Street.” “Liberty is in the Street” features the first vocals in the album, which will become an indicative staple of the Myrrors music. The vocals wash behind the instrumentation as an almost textural component similar to Deafheaven but cleanly sung and more decipherable, they draw the listener closer to envelop them in the warm desert sands this album calls home.
The album flows through a brief interlude before gliding into the titular track. “Entranced Earth” is a clear centerpiece of the album opening with trance-like horns that drag the listener across the desert floor, feet dragging as they stumble out into the endless dunes in search of a greater treasure than could be found in their homes. The track is expansive and compelling, speckled with small details that keep its endless build from staggering out into monotony, but never truly releasing its tension so much as leading into another unknown in the final moments of the track. The next milestone of the album is “Invitation Mantra” a sprawling epic of a song that immediately calls back to the opener “Mountain Morning” with natural sounds and creeping horns that journey in lazy patterns about the soundscape. The song is a much slower burn that never reaches its peak or releases any tension, allowing it to flow into the closer “Surem Dervish” with a washing static before rapidly building into a five minute crescendo that ends even more suddenly than it began, leaving the listener stranded in the Mojave begging for anything to quench their thirst.
Entranced Earth is a phenomenal album, often rapid in its intensity and directive, it lays out a clear set of goals and themes and carries them out in near flawless form. The largest slight that could be brought against this album is that no song truly stands out as they are all clearly meant to flow into one another. Normally this is hardly an issue but in this case it makes solo tracks near pointless and an immediate skip should they ever appear on a shuffle binge. With that one small slight aside, The Myrrors have managed to create a truly engaging explorative piece of art. Entranced Earth clearly and powerfully conveys the landscape and themes of the desert where The Myrrors have laid their roots, and invites listeners on a journey across a sun baked wasteland that is anything but barren.
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