Fractionals

Espers - Espers II

"There are shocks to the system hidden within II, but they're so pleasingly cushioned you never notice until afterwards. It’s an album that leaves you both soothed and disturbed, lulled and shaken by the group’s masterful blend of the comforting and the uncanny, slightly dazed as if returning from time travel or a knock on the head."
(Me)

Space-age crystalline sludge-folk about deceased royalty, magick, storms, visions, hypnosis, living nightmares and the fugue state. Uses everything from an Omnichord to a dholak. Their publishing company is called "gonedarkside." This should be insufferably twee and/or goth but is instead strangely touching and genuinely weird. If Joanna Newsom was into writing songs with actual choruses and lovingly exploring the varieties of drone in the context of popular song from the Elizabethan era on down, she might sound a little like this. Only one of the strengths of Espers is that they very much sound like a collective instead of a person or group of people, and while the rugged individualists have long been lionized in music criticism, maybe we should be paying a little more attention to the gains made by groups that have more fully mastered the seeming mind-meld. It's probably just planning, but on the slow motion waltzing drift of "Dead Queen" and the almost schematic (in a good way) "Children of Stone" it seems more like telepathy.