Sometimes life likes to drop little surprises on you and nothing is more relevant to that idiom than when an album by a band you have never heard off suddenly perks your ears up and you succumb to the listening pleasure. What makes this all the more surprising is the link with …And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of The Dead, but instead of their incendiary music you get something a lot more laid back and mood driven. The link is small with Midnight Masses being the brainchild of bass player Autry Fullbright II and drummer Jason Reece and formed as an offshoot band after Autry lost his father.
Bringing in a revolving door of musicians, Departures is certainly a departure in many ways from what has done before. Firmly ensconced in a new wave cold electronica feel, waves of krautrock rhythms fill out an at times superbly psychedelic backdrop. When they are not paying tribute to the greats such Kraftwerk, they take left turns into the maudlin pop territory of New Order, giving the whole album something of a new romantic sheen.
Those bands should only be seen as touchstones though as Midnight Masses are so much more than the sum of their influences and for the majority of this album they manage to produce some quite sublime music. Swapping between gleeful melodies and dark, introspective dirges, they create a whole feel that is both warm and organic, but also cold electronica. They manage to stride a fine line and bring a certain atmosphere to the table.
The opening triptych of songs are a fine example of this with ‘Golden Age’ trading on pop sensibilities before ‘Am I A Nomad?’ brings in all sorts of psychedelic flavours as Midnight Masses stretch out. The culmination being ‘All Goes Black’, which ends a great opening stretch.
If anything, the courage of their convictions can get too much at points and it almost becomes a vanity project at times. ‘Broken Mirror’ doesn't quite work and neither does the boring ‘Be Still’ later on in the album. What does work is the excellent krautrock of ‘Clap Your Hands’ leading into the again excellent ‘Everywhere is NowHere’. It's a point in the album where the music transcends its surroundings and it is as good as anything they have done with their day job.
The difficult thing with this sort of music is to keep the listener’s attention as there are only so many curve-balls you can throw in. A case in question could be Broken Bells who slipped up completely with their second album. Maybe shorn of a couple of songs, Departures could have been a lot better but as it stands it's not too shoddy. You'll take delight in the myriad changes that happen and when Midnight Masses really get going you may feel yourself in a little slice of heaven. It is an album that deals with loss and love and those two themes are delivered wonderfully through these songs. It's a slow-burner but one that reaches into your heart.
