Edena Gardens

The last few years have seen plenty of heights from Danish label El Paraiso, and one of the quickest rising has been new trio Edena Gardens. Where the label’s players have often embraced the cross-section between jazz and psych, there’s something deeper at play with the Gardens. Their albums are patient but pungent, finding the fissures in the foundation of psychedelia and seeping inside. As with their past albums, Papir’s Nicklas Sørensen takes the wheel with his snaking guitar lines. Recalling the tones of Ripley Johnson in his Moon Duo days or Talk Talk stripped back to the instrumentals, Sørensen steers the listener into cavernous grottoes of psych, oil slicked and infinitely comfortable in its miasma of moisture.

The album starts quiet and coiled, working through the delicacy of “Wald,” and the band’s nod to The Durutti Column on “Vini’s Lament,” but it opens into an ember-light glow on “Morgensol.” The song builds, throwing sparks and cinders as it peaks, Jakob Skøtt’s drums urging the guitars to glow with the kind of heat they long for throughout the first half of the album. The second half embraces the burn, letting the damp atmospheres of the beginning scorch away in the sunburn of “Sienita.” As the capper on a trilogy, Dens proves the pinnacle quite well. It’s a distillation of what Edena Gardens have been doing up ’til this point and it sets its predecessors as dark and tempestuous preamble to its heady glow.