Dec 6

Dec 6 20.

Cavern Of Anti-Matter -

Void Beats / Invocation Trex

[Duophonic]

It’s been over 8 years since Stereolab released a proper studio album, and it doesn’t seem like they’ll be getting back together too soon. This is a huge sadness to fans like me who find their vibrant, energetic and devilishly creative alt-synth-rock-pop sound to be one of the best in music history. Fortunately, we have Cavern Of Anti-Matter, the new project from Stereolab co-leader Tim Gane. Although missing a voice as fierce as Laetitia Sadier, Cavern Of Anti-Matter makes up for it in spades by just going hell-for-leather on the intricacies and layers of the analogue synth sounds they build up into multi-faceted futuristic ambient-electronic-rock songs.

Void Beats / Invocation Trex starts off with the 13-minute “Tardis Cymbals,” a relatively slow-paced number that fully justifies its extended running length.It feels like its slowly acclimatising the listener to this new atmosphere; bubbles of sound ascend around you, whooshes flash across the palette as the pressure struggles to equalise, and always beneath there is the motoric percussion ensuring that progress never falters. Once the opening track has settled you in, Cavern take you on a psychedelic tour of frantic situations, painted in neon. A lot of the album feels like a late-night car chase, or a soundtrack to the escape from a zombie hoard. The lack of vocals on the majority of the tracks is used to their advantage, as they can flick around between tones with ease. Across the album they skim through moods with aplomb. There’s scientific euphoria in “Blowing my nose under close observation,” to the cold and frantic jaunt of “Insect Fear,” into a warm melodic romp of “Melody In High Feedback Tones” – and then straight after you’re plummeted into spiraling paranoia of “Hi Hats Bring The Hiss.”

The songs might seem like skeletal structures at first, lacking a voice to cling to (although Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox and Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom both make fantastic guest vocal spots), but the organic way in which these songs manifest themselves through pristine and chewy synthesizer abstractions is really a marvel. Even without vocals the songs are so well tuned that there are undoubtedly moments of tension and release, parts where you’ll sing along to the melodies as though they’re choruses, and certainly parts where you’ll just lose yourself in the heady mesh of colourful ideas suddenly winding their way around your mind.

The album stretches to 72 minutes, which might seem like a slog, and perhaps will be for a lot of people. However, if you, like me, are entertained by the joyous aural products of interconnecting analogue synth melodies then Void Beats / Invocation Trex will keep you locked in throughout.

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Below you can see my top 50 albums of the year list.