Leisure Birds :: Globe Master :: Moon Glyph

There's a sort of Venn-diagram going on here -- the blurred line between Heaven and the heavens, perhaps even Catholic and catholic.  Where man meets myth, sin meets synth.  The ongoing fallacy of the human soul attaching a name to god.  The unspeakable.  The Mezuzah, the Dorian mode, the Byzantine slow-burner.  It seems that this fertile crescent is an ongoing theme for Oakland-via-Minneapolis label Moon Glyph.

Their most recent release is the sophomore LP from the Twin Cities' Leisure Birds.  Listening to Globe Master is like insisting that the Earth is flat to an alien force that's triangulated your location.  You fucked up, game over.  It's human anguish set to a conceptual arc of galactic defeat.  You won't need a lyric sheet to figure that one out.  No doubt, it can be a tough listen if you've got a big heart and a big imagination.  On a purely sonic level, it's brimming with hypnotic grooves and synthscapes, drifting and pummeling in the right places.  My only gripe is the lack of vocal harmony, which gives this set the off-setting illusion of one man's interstellar struggle, rather than the implied burden of the human race.  Which is not to say that I'm willing to join the choir, but I imagine there are more than a few Bill Pullman's out there.