Landing / Headroom - Split LP
If there’s one thing I won’t accept from fans of CT guitar sorceress Kryssi Battalene, it’s complaining that there isn’t anything new to hear – just wait a few minutes and I promise you, some new recording featuring her signature smoldering guitar will materialize. I had never heard Landing before (due to an unfair personal grudge based on the occasional confusion I’d suffer when seeing their name and thinking it said Landed instead), but their music here is a keen fit. Lovely long-term-married-couple indie-psych ambience, like Labradford on a chill-wave diet, or Windy & Carl if they allowed a little trip-hop to seep beneath the blurry tapestry of soothing chords (both guitar-based and synthesizer-derived). If you weren’t relaxed before the record started, you certainly are now, and Battalene’s Headroom maintain your horizontal position with three elegiac psych-rock movements. I have to wonder if they’re showing their hand a little bit by pumping out so much content… their music is soothing and extended, like a drip of sweat on the tip of Neil Young’s nose, but by releasing so much of it at such a furious clip, is it basically as though Headroom And Co. are saying “this is all much too easy for us”? They could at least pretend that some level of frustration and trial-and-error went into their tunes, so that it feels like a special moment of success, like some secret one-of-a-kind gem we must tenderly hold. Chances are that it’s both easy and special, though, and as long as the CT Psych-Rock Association continues to have such a productive run, I hope their faucet remains wide open. - Yellow Green Red
Redscroll Records