Ookii Gekkou album cover
Ookii Gekkou

Vanishing Twin

2021
Fire Records

If “exotica” can mean everything from Martin Denny to Sun Ra, and “psychedelia” can be microdosed down to brief but intense moments of clarity, then you could go ahead and apply those otherwise nebulous terms to Vanishing Twin. Place those referents alongside the common — and flatteringly more-or-less-accurate — comparisons to post-rock-adjacent precedents like Stereolab (whose Laetitia Sadier guests on guitar for “Wider Than Itself”) and Broadcast (former collaborator/electronics manipulator Phil M.F.U. is a core member of Vanishing Twin), and you can find a similarly internationalist sense of yearning solidarity that permeates Ookii Gekkou. Infused with an almost utopian sense of hope in the midst of a cloistered, pandemic-handcuffed existence, Vanishing Twin’s third album evokes the strangeness of vintage experimental music without the burden of retro-kitsch, made approachable yet compellingly enigmatic by the epiphany-puzzling lyrics and benevolent-phantom voice of Cathy Lucas. There might be turmoil beneath the surface — the skittering tension of “Tub Erupt” (“Don’t let the thoughts at the back of your mind/Slide too far down your spine/They’ll come back and eat your heart alive/Eat your, eat your heart alive”) and the title cut’s apocalypse-as-creation lunar mythos see to that — but if you can harness that chaos into an appreciation for the strange power of human existence, and set it all to some small-crowd-big-room Afro-disco (“Phase One Million”) or hushed yet buzzing microfunk (“The Lift”), you’ll find a lot more parameters to expand from there.

Nate Patrin

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