Blue Sky/Grey Heaven is the new album from Oakland based duo The Acharis who are Lila Puccini and Shaun Wagner. The album has been produced and mixed by the legendary Mr John Fryer.
This opens with Traces that sounds like its taken Nico's Desertshore as a jumping off point and added some operatic vocals and a bass drum that almost sounds like a gun report as it opens out into a dance rock avant garde song that's rather beguiling.
Devil Locke starts of quiet before breaking out into a pummeling percussive storm tempered by the guitars that wrap around everything as the vocals sound like they were recorded underwater keeping them nice and indistinct as the tsunami of sound envelops them.
Soft Inside is somewhat sweeter sounding with Mila's vocals being rather gauzy and the guitars are chiming as some odd things happen in the percussive elements and this feels like it has a Bjork influence.
The single Jesus thrill is next, it sounds like they have bought some of those little Jesus cartoon books, that used to be sold on the streets in San Francisco and have added a good dose of Train careening round a bend rhythm, a motoric dance beat, to ethereal vocals to get across the thrill they get from the cartoons.
False Positive has a sense of dread musically and envelopes you like Slowdive might as we worry about what the False Positive might indicate, do they have Covid, are they Pregnant do they have the big C or are they free of all those things and in search of some Jesus And Mary Chain style thrills.
Blue Sky opens with some spoken word over ambient room noises and sampled chatter and disappears as quickly as a Blue Sky can at this time of year. As it leads straight into In The Blue Room that sounds like you could stage a recreation of Yves Klein Blue to this as it is perfect for some Anthropometries, and I speak as someone who took part in a gender reversed version of that piece.
Grey Heaven is like the rumble of a dastardly thunderstorm rolling towards you and threatening to unleash a months' worth of rain in half an hour or so it is a foreboding sounding piece.
The album closes with the strummed guitar of What A Shame that feels like they are giving you some peaceful resolution after the storm, even though the lyrics are rather more downbeat but very much in keeping with the times we live in as is the rest of this rather cool album.
Find out more at https://www.zumonline.com/collections/the-acharis https://www.facebook.com/theacharis https://theacharis.bandcamp.com/album/blue-sky-grey-heaven
