We at Music Feeds, like you, have always wanted to see phrases like “reverse missionaries from Melbourne” and “otic tsunami” in an album review, so we recruited Liam Wilson, bassist of The Dillinger Escape Plan, to write up Closure In Moscow‘s sophomore effort, ‘Pink Lemonade’.
Five machine elves who go by the collective name Closure In Moscow just spiked the proverbial punchbowl with a heroic dose of powdered dinosaur placenta called Pink Lemonade. Their sophomore sipper is a psychoactive syrup that promises to save the brave from a fate worse than death: modern mainstream music. Every hemi-syncing hymn off this self-released tweaker’s dozen seamlessly unfolds with the stamina of a Jacob’s ladder toy.
In the year 2014, with no apparent lack of inspirational ends or means (other than the distraction inherent in technology itself), there’s little more emotionally deafening than hearing new releases with too few ideas spread watery thin. On the other hand, there’s few things as refreshing in our fast-forward age of “Hurry up and wait!” as discovering well-crafted and truly gratifying contemporary music.
Watch: Closure In Moscow – The Church of the Technochrist
Like cardio for your attention span, Pink Lemonade is a self-induced brain enema that over-probes your inner canals with pineal-popping prowess. It’s the aural equivalent of the Ludivico Technique from A Clockwork Orange, and these reverse missionaries from Melbourne have returned to strap you in and force-feed your ears with the past 60 years of Western music’s best exports in just over 60 minutes.
It’s one thing to hear inexperienced musicians parrot their influences with insufficient concealment, and another to hear professionals refract these gospels of light back into the musical multiverse like a prism. On Pink Lemonade, Closure In Moscow have respectfully stepped up where patron saints like Zappa, Mercury, Buckley, and Brown stepped out.
Swathed in rich layers like an ultraviolet oil painting, viscous tracks like Seeds Of Gold are practically still wet, and thus splash, sparkle and shimmer like salmon sequins on a sweet and sour shore. The music is at once familiar yet capable of quickly camouflaging itself like the weirdest deep sea creature this otic tsunami could have coughed up. These songs blush and shape-shift in a tireless turbo-mutation of lyrical invocations, which strongly suggest these shamans are tripping on their own juices.
Listen: Closure In Moscow – Pink Lemonade
Pink Lemonade is their open-to-the-public séance where they serve as worthy mediums, calling forth ensorcelled spirits into the future-present like a fabulous Frankenstein of frequencies. Pulsating with genuine emotional extremes analogous to their inspirational archetypes, yet careful not to plagiarise their preachings.
Accepting that nothing is truly original, the focus should be on what we make, not from where we take. We’ve all heard it said many times, many ways: a good artist borrows and a great artist steals. To create art is to steal. True artists celebrate theft, and making things worth stealing.
As true warrior saints on a hero’s quest to musical enlightenment, we may very well encounter Buddhas on our path, and if we do, we must be prepared to slay them. It is our nature and destiny to both elevate and exterminate our gods, in order to become gods ourselves.
In this, the Yawning of the Age of Aquarius, generations are group-texting their prayers for better music with increasing urgency to the great big drop box in the sky. Behold ye Brahmatrons, ye Technochrists, rejoice! Raise your chalices of pale-red and toast as music’s neoteric nook is fashioned into a #hashtagged theology. Closure In Moscow are the shepherds and Sherpas sent here to guide us out of the deserts of artistic despair, and Pink Lemonade is our supersonic litany, strobing towards a buffer-free singularity.
Closure In Moscow’s second album, ‘Pink Lemonade’, is available now.
Listen: Closure In Moscow – Dinosaur Boss Battle
