Perhaps it was that the eye-catching cover of “Globe Master” – the recently released and instantly engrossing album by Leisure Birds – subliminally put thoughts of an easy journal to other planets in our mind before we’d even heard the opening track. Perhaps, as it is a journey we’ve made (or attempted to make) in the past, we felt at ease shifting into the multi-dimensional musical moonlight that shines brightly, continuously throughout the album.
Perhaps Leisure Birds show the size and scope of their wingspan on the album’s nearly nine-minute opening opus, “SETI Signals.” It’s difficult to fight thoughts of astral flight – not that you’d want to, as Leisure Birds score the outer-space journey magnificently, magnetically.
Download “Silver Runner” from “Globe Master,” by Leisure Birds
But something happens once we pass through the heavenly haze that starts the album. Once we land aboard the “Silver Runner,” an earth-bound collision of chants and wobbly, wandering synths that seems to produce an impenetrable gravitational force that lingers for the remainder of the album, something shifts. As the journey of Leisure Birds continues its earth-bound course, in its celebratory, cosmic-crush of the ecstatic and odd, our impressions takes a redshift turn away from the intergalactic and towards the introspective.
Is there a difference? Ground control to Major Thom:
“Where there is carrion lying, meat-eating birds circle and descend. Life and death are two. The living attack the dead, to their own profit … But they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, ‘nothing,’ the ‘no-body’ that was there, suddenly appears … It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey.”
Ground control to Leisure Birds: “Globe Master” is cleared for landing in our conscious and subconscious mind. Thanks for putting us at ease and we’re certain we’ll be taking this journey again and again.
Live on Radio K: Leisure Birds – “Egyptian Ring” from Radio K on Vimeo.
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