It's a unique situation in its ability to spook the hell out of both claustrophobic and agoraphobic character types.
Aspera's Birds Fly EP is a terrific musical simulation of the above conditions. This is a weird little disc, full of moonboot synthesizers, short snatches of eerie, reverbed guitar, and the kind of overwhelming drum sound I tend to associate with latter-day Flaming Lips. Of course, the Flaming Lips are an obvious comparison-- as is Spiritualized! But where those bands cultivate sound so thick it could swallow you whole, Aspera pulls back just at the moment you expect a thunderous chorus. This is not bad; in fact, the relative sparseness of some of these songs creates a serious sense of weightlessness. For a psychedelic band leaning ever closer to space-rock with each subsequent release, this, for me, is a desired result. But just as a single body, drifting through the vastness of space, seems awfully tiny and insignificant, the vast majority of these songs suffer from their disproportionate ratio of instrumentation-to-silence.
I had reservations about this technique from the very beginning of the title track, which begins with a high-pitched carnival keyboard and super-spare drumming. When the guitar and bass enter for the chorus, the song recovers enough density to keep me from wondering whether the tinny quality of the music was a deliberate effect or an offshoot of poor recording. (For the record, I'm almost positive it's the former, but I could be wrong.)
Despite its chorus of synthesized voices, "Heaven's on Your Right Side" never completely solidifies, perhaps because the dirge-like drums of the verses do little but call attention to what's missing. That the chorus reminds me of a zero-gravity rendition of "You Are My Sunshine" only exacerbated the problem. There's a very nice instrumental bridge that again reaches nearly reaches full sound capacity only to end too quickly.
And this is a problem that plagues Birds Fly as a whole. In contrast to psych and space-rock's progenitors, Aspera keep the vast majority of their songs at just under three minutes-- a feat achieved by stopping just before what seems to be the natural conclusion of the song. This is fine for one track, maybe, but when an entire record follows this model, it makes you wonder if it isn't just a contrivance to mask running out of steam. Or, put another way, these are not bad songs-- they just sound unfinished. Yet, where an album might suffer terribly from so much vacancy, the brevity of the EP format (and of the individual songs) makes the affectation somewhat more digestible.
Aspera's departure from the more straightforward psychedelia of their earlier releases bodes well for future innovations, and the time that passes between this record and their next full-length may give them time to grow into all that space.
