Kingdom of Heaven

When Pale Saints Ian Masters and His Name Is Alives Warn Defever first collaborated as ESP Summer in the mid-90s, the project seemed like an all-too-short-lived one-off. Primarily a studio entity, ESP Summer presented the best of both artists styles while at the same time becoming something beyond just the combined powers of the people involved. Their sole self-titled album (recorded in 1994 and issued on CD in 1996) was a beautifully minimal landscape of uncluttered acoustic songs and vocals that managed a dreamlike quality without requiring the usual bath of reverb and delay. As the years moved on, ESP Summer seemed destined to exist as a footnote in both Masters and Defevers discographies, but in 2020 new material began appearing without notice. An EP of mostly wordless ambience and field recordings was followed by Kingdom of Heaven, a four-song album that finds the band cycling through different interpretations of the 13th Floor Elevators shadowy 1966 tune of the same name. Its unclear if this material is archival or freshly recorded, or some combination of the two. The first iteration, Tengoku No Ōkoku (Japanese for Kingdom of Heaven), is a tangle of darkly psychedelic guitars and slogging drum machine beats. Defevers phaser-heavy guitars and Masters distant vocals both recall the turbulence of obscure psych bands like Dark or White Heaven, with the players intrinsic 4AD backgrounds adding a slightly goth touch to the song. As the album goes on, the duo revisit Kingdom of Heaven a few more times, including a subdued acoustic version and one doused in effects and fading in and out of a longer ambient piece. Elsewhere on the brief record, there are moments of anthemic guitar, undercurrents of noise, deeply buried vocal melodies, and the kind of collage aesthetic that defined the earliest His Name Is Alive albums. Its a progression from the delicate sounds that ESP Summer made 25 years earlier, but still exemplifies the otherworldly chemistry and air of suspended time that arise from Masters and Defevers collaborative connection. ~ Fred Thomas