Fantasy World

Grailsの創設メンバーで米国ポートランドの辺境サイケデリックロックサウンドを作り上げるLilacs & Champagne。今作は感傷的なテレビ音楽のような奇妙な展開や子供たちの合唱団、そしてこれまでに作り上げた中で最もブラックな恐怖に満ちた音楽など超越的はファンタジー・ワールドでありトラウマ的サウンド。

Emil Amos and Alex Hall, both of instrumental post-rock outfit Grails, started the side project Lilacs & Champagne during the early 2010s in order to explore lush, cinematic, sample-based music adjacent to instrumental hip-hop. Some of the projects electronic textures seeped into Grails work, and Amos solo albums treaded similar territory. Fantasy World marks the first L&C release in nearly a decade, and its another set of eerie voices, ominous melodies, and dusty breakbeats. Not much has really changed in the duos world, but the album serves as an effective dose of heady psychedelia laced with dark humor. Opener "Ill Gotten Gains" has a spooky funhouse vibe, with ghostly voices, choppy samples, and a dramatically slow breakdown. "Rude Dream" is so atmospheric its actually refreshing, even if it inhabits a gloomy mood. "Fantasy Land" sounds like a hazier, more noir-inspired version of a Madlib beat. The albums most bizarre, disturbing, and sickly funny moment is "Evil Has No Boundaries," which is based around some truly ridiculous and tasteless stage banter ("Do you like older women? You know, the kind you dig out of a grave?"), set to cut-up drums and chunky guitars with a cartoonishly devilish quality to them. The brief tape manipulation nightmare "Leprotic Phantasies" has one of the albums most infectious rhythms, along with brief slices of Pink Floyd-sounding vocals. The rainy-day guitar riffs, strings, and distant vocals of "Ordinary Man" feel like a dream right on the cusp of lucidity. Fantasy World is a welcome return to Lilacs & Champagnes singular, surreal realm. ~ Paul Simpson