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Scarlet Utopia: Adventures Under Black Light
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Nasoni Records (NASONI096-2 CD)
 Scarlet Utopia is a new German space rock band and some of the members also play in a group called Silverheat. The band’s influences include for example Bardo Pond, Sun Dial, Amon Düül II, Nik Turner, Mandragora Lightshow Society, Sula Bassana ja Helios Creed, but also Killing Joke, Diamanda Galas, The Damned, Depeche Mode and The Cure. This is the debut album by this quartet with a female singer and was originally released privately by the band but this limited edition is already sold out. This re-mastered Nasoni version has one different track and the album is now also available on vinyl.
The album starts off with the hypnotic, mid-tempo “Black Sun” that is over 12 minutes in length. The track has a groovy, striking and repetitive rhythm, great vocals and very nice, psychedelic guitar work as well as electronic space effects. Excellent! ”NGC 1365 Spiral Galaxy” begins with a robotic Vocoder narration and then comes the pretty slow beat and atmospheric playing and vocals with suitably spacey lyrics. The track also has a nice, bit more melodic chorus. ”Omega Spacewalk” is a mid-tempo, really good space rock number that has quite heavy guitar (also some killer solos!), superb vocals, psychedelic speech samples etc. I also really like the song’s bass lines that occasionally remind me of Geezer Butler a little. Amazing! “Moonlight Society” is again some mid-tempo rocking being closer to metal than space rock although there are some space noises included as well. Finally we get the album’s shortest (5:17) track “Supernovae” that was also released as a single. It is a melancholic and beautiful piece that sort of brings to mind the space ballads of DarXtar. The electronic effects enhance the cosmic mood in a great way. In summary, this is a very good, 45-minute-long package, but an addition of a couple of faster tracks might have cheered things up a bit.
www.myspace.com/scarletutopia |
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