Review Summary: Through cohesive songwriting and a willingness to experiment with different sounds, Electric Moon create one of the best psychedelic rock albums of the year.
Let’s face it; there is a lot of boring stoner rock out there. If you’re not having to put up with banal ‘tough guy’ vocals then you’re still quite likely to be hit with a barrage of uninspired Black Sabbath-worshipping riffs for six minutes. Of course this isn’t the case with a lot of the established bands in the somewhat niche market of stoner rock and heavy psych, who generally have the songwriting chops to pull ‘Sabbath worship’ off convincingly. Yet there is no escaping the fact that this kind of heavy psych remains a heavily-trodden path, and generally speaking, it becomes harder for some of the more ‘obscure’ bands to break free of the hegemony. For German trio Electric Moon, however, Stardust Rituals looks to have done just that.
What separates Electric Moon from their mediocre counterparts is that they completely understand the importance of repetition in a way that others don’t. What we’re getting with Stardust Rituals is not a mix of snail-paced riffs on a seemingly-endless loop, but rather a set of crescendos which explore texture amidst repetitive grooves. The album is essentially a succession of rhythmic bass riffs underneath psychedelic guitar noodling and idle, reverberated vocal lines. Each song on the album builds in intensity in a variety of ways, bar the third track, which serves as more of a transition into the 23-minute finale.
Opener ‘The Loop’ gets off to a vintage start with an organ riff anchoring the song, before picking up the tempo halfway through with a more driving beat to increase the sense of urgency and tension. Conversely, ‘Stardust (The Picture)’ utilises the same bass riff for the entire song, but the sounds explored by guitarist Sula Bassana throughout the track’s 10-minute runtime are incredible; the leads are slathered in ‘wah’ effects to create a cosmic soundscape which morphs and shifts like space itself. Meanwhile the vocals add to this effect with a massive amount of reverb. The pure amount of reverb means that vocalist Komet Lulu doesn’t have to make the vocal lines themselves especially dynamic; her lines are generally quite monotonous and ethereal, helping to pull the listener into a trance.
‘Astral Hitch Hike’ introduces an Eastern flavour with a sitar melody over a more ‘busy’ bass riff, but it’s the closer ‘(You Will) Live Forever’ which proves to be the album’s undeniable highlight. The song very gradually builds in intensity for the first fifteen minutes using the same techniques that were used in the previous songs, before stripping everything back to a few gentle chords floating through the air above shamanic-like vocal chants. This gives way to an oscillating, repetitive guitar lead before a string section emerges from the fray to give the album an emotive and climactic ending. The band shows an incredible amount of restraint by letting the track build gradually into this finish, resulting in the final few minutes feeling like the apotheosis of what the entire album has built towards.
Electric Moon aren’t reinventing the wheel so much as they are showing everyone else how to write a psychedelic rock album effectively. Not a moment on Stardust Rituals feels out of place or unnecessary; on the contrary, each track is meticulously crafted not only texturally, but structurally too. Not only do the band have a consistent, easily-identifiable way of writing songs, but they also have enough variation in each to create an album which is as dynamic as it is cohesive. Strap in, lose yourself in the elysian album art and prepare to traverse the astral plane.
