The 53 seconds of opener An Hallucination prove suitably delirious, and sound like Tears For Fears drifting in and out of various solar systems, Richie Egan's vocals feathery and warped as if crossing time zones of varying lightyears. (Time, logic, and the track itself are later reversed for the equally trippy Na Niotancullah.) Please Don't Turn The Record Off follows, and sounds something like a synth siren being pinned down and smothered with kisses from The Flaming Lips, a modulating, Michael Ivins-esque bass line powering the track through the gears. So far so innovative, so avant-garde, thus providing little incentive to change the metaphorical channel. The Oldest Mind is dangerously addictive, elating guitar lines evocative of those cast by Romy Madley Croft married with the comatose ambience of Screamadelica's more fatigued moments. The segueing Too Many People then serves as something of a continuation of Please Don't Turn The Record Off, a penetrative throbbing lower end almost recycled, coming across a little like YesYou obsessing over a Dr. Rhythm drum machine, before a cosmic keyboard interlude worthy of the great Oscar Cash interjects. There's nowt in any way reprocessed when it comes to One Of Those Days That Just Feels So Long however, the slump of autotuned proto-funk rutting with a gloriously low-key chorus, while the galactic folk of Borrowed Time With Peace sounds like mellow radio-molesting Manics bred with Of Moons, Birds & Monsters to bear melancholic mutation. Scorpio meanwhile seems to have some drops of the veritably South American in its gene pool, jiggling panpipes riding the storm of a robust rhythm section, and is quite palatable. However from here on in a plethora of mismatched genres hurtle about in the mix like miscellaneous debris drifting down the Milky Way: from the Krautrock-meets-psych-meets-entirely-unnecessary-wobble of Internal Machine, to Its Shadow Won't Make Noise, a bizarre composition that gives the impression of Conor Oberst ad libbing over Medieval Venetian lute music, it's disappointing that all the promise cultivated in the first half of the record dwindles so drastically in its second.
