Picturesque

Following the release and promotion of the Austrian duos debut album, 2019s All That Ever Could Have Been, MOLLYs Lars Andersson delved into works of the Romantic era, a period whose paintings, music, and writings had long struck a chord. Forced out of performance venues due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he poured himself into his bands second album, using the influence of period fairy tales -- and especially Heinrich von Ofterdingen by German writer/philosopher Novalis -- as a conceptual guide. He ultimately wrote, recorded, mixed, and mastered the resulting Sonic Cathedral follow-up, Picturesque, with bandmate Phillip Dornauer contributing drums. Lusher and more dramatic than their already textural, cinematic debut, with songs of up to 12-and-a-half minutes in length containing episodic peaks and valleys in sound, it finds Andersson adopting and loyally following a "more is more" credo. Opening song "Ballerina" is one of the more structured tracks here, clocking in at just over four minutes and launching into stratified guitars and a full-band arrangement from the first seconds. As with much of the album, Anderssons voice is lucid rather than buried in its sea of crashing cymbals, guitar tremolos, and sustain, although the instruments do the heavy lifting in conveying mood and emotion. Unlike much of the rest, the song also features a consistent tempo and a rhythm section that only pauses briefly two-thirds of the way through. Layers of distortion shroud the final third of "Ballerina," as vocals recede into howling vowel sounds. These types of contrasts only grow stronger later on, including on the sprawling, aptly titled second track, "Metamorphosis," which contains a five-minute vocal-free passage. When Anderssons voice returns alongside a bittersweet melodic guitar line, its with sentiments including, "You...might be losing me again for a while." The album takes a relative breather two-thirds of the way through with sparer organ track "Sunday Kid," which does bury highly edited vocals, but returns to grandeur with a vengeance on the denser waves of "So to Speak" and 11-minute closer "The Lot," which takes a turn from bittersweetness into deep melancholy. Occasionally breathtaking, Picturesque establishes itself as the definitive album in MOLLYs short discography. ~ Marcy Donelson