Mythic Sunship

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To preface this review by noting that Mythic Sunship have always felt criminally underrated on this side of the Atlantic is a bit of sermon to the served. Hell, there are precious few bands featured here that I reckon are getting the accolades they deserve, but Mythic Sunship feel like they’re serving up something necessary and vital in 2022. Straddling the lines between psych, jazz, improvisational music, and prog, the band’s sound is hard to pin down. The group spent years building up a catalog on Copenhagen’s great El Paraiso, a hive of interconnected works that all skirt the aforementioned influences. Their approach on those albums, including an essential live outing caught on tape at Roskilde, has always been one of feeling out the form in the studio. Planning was secondary to the moment. There was an electricity to those records that felt like it might crumble the concrete moorings if it didn’t melt the tape first. They made a jump to Tee Pee last year and brought another scorcher with them, a seemingly perfect fit for the band to expand their inferno to Western shores.

On Light/Flux the band have decided to lay aside the studio-improv approach, instead crafting an album of tightly wound, yet explosive compositions that flow with a meditated approach. The living beast of their sound — often tethered somewhere between Thorenfeldt/Andersen’s guitar attack and Søren Skov’s sax burndowns — is reigned in but still pulling against its chains. The first half lets the tension brew before “Equinox” begins fanning the flames. The resulting album ebbs and flows. It creates pocket universes of tension and turbulence, still largely ignited by Skov’s always exhilarating sax work. Though, the planned approach give the band time for more nuance. The open tones in “First Frost” and loose strumming in “Aurora” both feel like elements that have been lost to the storm on their previous albums. The band’s fusion has always skewed heavy and decidedly heady, but here the intricate folds begin to show as they set the table before burning it down.

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