Solar Bloom and desk lamps Reviewed
Solar Bloom – Technomasochism
Remember your dad, or your uncle, sneaking off to the bar after a hard day’s work and spending two, three, four hours there every night? Remember what your other relatives and the neighbours used to say about this kind of behaviour? Well, nothing good.
They might’ve even gone so far as to compare it to those people who used to become near-permanent residents of some opium den. They would’ve felt pity for someone choosing to empty their minds for long stretches of time and, effectively, lose their wits.
Solar Bloom might remember those kinds of things, and can’t see any difference between it and the current online addicts. Research shows that most people spend nearly as much time with their eyes buried inside a small screen as they do sleeping.
That’s why “Technomasochism” is a strange beast. The sound suggests the psychedelic journeys of 1960s explorers. But this isn’t a trip inside the outer reaches of the mind. Solar Bloom have written a complex rock piece about losing your mind to someone else’s short-form video fantasy.
desk lamps – No Map, No Territory
For most of the time, rock songs are just like the road that you take in your car every day to get home. You know where it begins, where it ends and, after a while, it’s hard to pretend that the whole business of getting from one point to the other is very fun.
Sure, it makes life easier if you ever decide to play in a Chuck Berry cover band and want to learn songs as quickly as possible. Of course, it makes knowing when to punch the air to coincide with the guitar solo in a Van Halen song an easy task.
But it’s all also quite predictable. Just what happens to your music-enjoying brain in between those breaks? That’s something worth analysing, and you’d need more than a verse-chorus-verse structure to get to the truth, as desk lamps have found out.
“No Map, No Territory” is a fascinating piece of music that, while carefully composed and orchestrated, sounds, at times, like the inner chatter of a man who forgets his train of thought, pauses, and ends up in a completely different inner monologue. It’s an exciting experiment and, in some ways, much more honest than typical rock tunes.
