By: Steve Fallows
Mugstar | website | facebook | twitter | bandcamp |
Despite living in Liverpool for nearly five years and checking out many local bands and shows over that time, it was only last years’ superb hometown show supporting Dylan Carlson’s Earth that brought Mugstar to my attention. I bought a single and just as I am getting their other releases together, they come out with ‘Magnetic Seasons’, their seventh album.
The album opens with ’Unearth’ and its slow building intro. It welcomes you into the proceedings and immediately draws you into its own psychedelic world. The first three tracks are all built in the same way, slowly gathering momentum as they progress. They start slowly and quietly, but gradually become more raucous before fading away again. ‘Flemish Weave’ is a great example, as the band conjure up something akin to a classic Sonic Youth sound in the middle of the track, which is more like the show I saw last year, a wilder side to an otherwise very precise set of tunes.
Once you get to the fifteen minute ‘Remember The Breathing’, things begin to change, and the album takes on a much mellower sound and mood. The next few tracks float by in a haze of simple but addictive repetitive melodies that allow the listener to drift off and carried away into the bands world again, just as it did at the very start of the album. This feeling carries on throughout the remainder of the album. ‘Sky West and Crooked’ is the most soothing, almost ethereal moment on the album. This leads into the album closer ‘Ascension Island’ that builds like some previous tracks, before slowly deconstructing over its seventeen-minute running time to the point where the album becomes little more than a disparate noise as the last few seconds die out.
This is an album that you can easily lose yourself in. As a complete work, it flows effortlessly, and listening to it through headphones will completely take you away from the outside world for a short while, and everyone needs to do that once in a while, and music is by far the best way to do it. Now its just a question of getting the rest of their back catalogue together.
