Vanishing Twin

There’s a chill in the air and despite working through this new Vanishing Twin album for the past couple of months, now it truly makes sense. The aura that circles the air above Ookii Gekkou is crisp, to say the least. Maybe a bit more air-conditioned than autumnal, but certainly not warming the listener with its glow. The band has long been mining the same Radiophonic repositories and psychedelic folk fields that fed into Broadcast, The Soundcarriers, and Mushroom, melding a hallucinatory, yet antiseptic funk with a ‘60s psychedelic beat that’s more versed in Italian Library soundtracks than Eddie Hazel mind scorch. There’s a composure to their works that’s often cracked by fray. The ultramodern curves and calming colors speak of ‘60s infrastructure, but there’s a festering madness between the cracks and crevices, under the screw top and inside the tubes of all the fixtures.

The album starts out with a brisk motorik motion before it begins to fray, letting a lysergic mix of images into the View-Master’s window of formica and function as we settle into “Zuum” and “The Organism.” Pomade begins to fester under the fluorescents and the air gains a bit of Kirby-Krackle that seems a portent of something sinister weeping from the walls. The mid-section of the LP dissociates into a heady mix of groove and grey matter massage before the group rubber bands back into the recycled air of the lounge on with the rain-streak steam of “Wider Than Itself.” The band’s catalog is already pretty heavily stacked with necessities, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t say that Ookii Gekkou feels like a high water mark.

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