Search - Young Gods :: Heaven Deconstruction

Alienated majesty

semanticfelon | tempe, arizona United States | 02/17/2002

(5 out of 5 stars)

"The Young Gods have won a small but impassioned group of admirers for their emotionally angular, hypercerebral, and poetically experimental rock permutations. For this effort, however, founder F. Treichler drops even his token attempts at Rock formalism and ventures far into a synthetic landscape without any of the comforting signposts (rousing vocals, squalling guitars) that could help to orient people into the terrain occupied by this Swiss group. Apart from a recognizable remix of Strangel, now given a new electro skin and almost danceable, structure is largely absent or hiding on this album. Ghosts of TYG are sprinkled througout, but the emphasis here is on mood, specifically a kind that is sleepily celestial to the point of losing sight of the ground entirely- even a track titled 'Landing' is ominous, unsettling- the bass notes churning resemble the sounds of a military helicopter or UFO descending from some dreamlike section of the firmament. The dream state is occasionally lightened-see the chanting children on the brief 'nano pata.' But on the whole, what really shows the mark of TYG on this effort is the fixation on the irreal, fantastic, suddenly violent, unlikely poetic that Treichler and company have so memorably evoked in their albums. An interesting one-off that in many ways surpasses the other studio efforts."