Stirling Roswell AKA Rosco was kind enough to give me a copy of his latest solo album when I ran into him recently at a gig when we were both in the audience. I'm always happy to hear any offshoot from Spacemen 3 and this is no exception.
The acid-toned cover of spaceships over the Houses of Parliament drops a hefty hint that this is going to be a space rock journey of some sort; something the song titles reinforce. From the opening Interplanetary Spaceliner we are off on a journey, but not quite the journey you might expect as this is space but with a love of Beach Boys and Stereolab with a good dose of Luna thrown in for good measure.
Interplanetary Spaceliner launches us into Rosco's world but it's the recent single Give Peace Another Chance that slows things down and sounds like it could have been a Jacques Dutronc song that got lost in London in a haze of Quaaludes and Marijuana on the soundtrack to a late 60's downbeat kitchen sink drama. It's a glorious slice of summer paisley pop, in other words.
The Girl from Orbit In Dub, however, takes us into the sort of territory that suggests Crystallized Movements being orchestrated and re-worked by Scott Walker. It's a gorgeous piece of enveloping music to bliss out and relax too. The blips and maracas at the end are very cool sounding as if we are all lost in space.
Asteroid no. B-612 starts out like a long lost bit of Sun Ra electronica recorded in some sort of echo chamber. It revolves around the speakers, slowly building in the way some of Glenn Branca's symphonic works build while also being a bit reminiscent of Experimental Audio Research's Koner Experiments to help to take you further out of yourself to another sphere of consciousness. Maan.
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Island Of Ether opens like it's going to be Spacemen 3-style drone mantra extravaganza only with lots of odd noises layered on top of the drone before what sounds like a steel pan drum gone wrong comes in and diverts us into a maelstrom of noise before the drone returns and fades in and out of the cacophony.
Tripmaker re-works and hyper-psychedelisizes The Seeds' Pushing Too Hard as the acid fries our brains and gets us grooving along to the buzzing sounds flying around our minds and we realize it's actually a Seeds song in the first place! This is not for drug free ears, go find your local Tripmaker and climb on board. It makes me want to get higher and more out there than the codeine I'm on at present gets me!!
From there we are off to the Outskirts Of Infinity to enjoy this trip and not freak out too much if we notice that we've arrived in a Counter Clock World as our brains are flying and we've tripped out in a miasma of sounds from other planets as the album closes with Time Is Of The Essence. It's a perfect freak out/fade out, take us to the other side of infinity piece and the ideal way to close a great space-y album.
Listen to Sterling Roswell at Bandcamp
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