Album Review : Altar Eagle - Mechanical Gardens
- Written by Greg Johnson
Mechanical Gardens is the latest release from husband and wife Brad Rose and Eden Hemming's Altar Eagle. It's a soft lit romp between warm, fuzzy synthesisers and glassy techno bathed in the saturation of a super 8 camera. It could be the soundtrack to some hazy evening lost to the corner of an ATP chalet, or a dusty field filled with summer time, hangovers and the peaceful slow motion of an over heated, relaxed mind.
Considering his other projects (The North Sea, ajilvsga, Alligator Crystal Moth) Rose isn't the first name you would naturally associate with soft focussed alt-pop but Mechanical Gardens is a triumph of rich, flowing electronic dream pop that offers ease of access into its nine crumbling, colour-bled tracks without resorting to gimmickry or forfeiting its calm, ethereal qualities to po-faced demands for melody.
Throughout the album, your ears are drawn to wandering through the mental record collection within your head, gliding across names of artists conjured, like quotations, from Mechanical Gardens. However, this isn't a brand of deja vu or some hatchet hint at something not entirely original at the heart of the album. On the contrary, you feel as if the two halves of Altar Eagle have travelled through their own musical influences and arrived at something entirely their own on the other side.
From the very start, the shoegazing of Slowdive collides with M.I.A.'s sample snatches and aching synths as they pour through opener ‘Battlegrounds’ before delving into ‘Honey’. Further on we find the haunting mumbles of ‘Monsters’ housed in what feels like Bloc Party on one of their more successful electronic jaunts, reshuffled and reassembled with fuzzy, static soaked velcro. Altar Eagle even try splicing detroit techno with My Bloody Valentine's Butcher/Shields vocal dynamics for later track ‘Spy Movie’. Closing the album, ‘Six Foot Arms’ holds something of the Animal Collective about it with its scatty background and pulsing, prodding synths that stab in and out of the fore. It's hard not to fall into compiling a list whilst attempting to convey the vast spread of mental music triggers littered throughout.
At times, Mechanical Gardens feels like some witty set of remixes fired about by two battling DJs in the throws of the friendliest of rivalries. As an album its a hypnotic 45 minutes of shoegazing, ethereal dream pop with a beating techno heart that rips your mind to pieces with joy as you unfurl the layers of each track. Your brain will race with every connection it creates from the rich soup of influences on offer, but it can't get in the way of such an enjoyable oddity of an album.