When the movie sucks, you don't tend to stick it out for the deleted scenes. Same goes for albums: It's hard to be excited about the recently unearthed outtakes from a record that was pretty lousy on its own. Psychic Ills' 2009 misfire Mirror Eye wasn't the kind of thing most hoped for more of. The Ills' latest, Catoptric, is a four-song set culled from the same sessions that birthed Mirror Eye, originally intended for a concurrent release as a mini LP. But despite a somewhat shaky premise, Catoptric thankfully plays more like a separate featurette than a blooper reel.
Mirror Eye was meditative, its gaze inward, lots of long, billowy, slate-grey drones moving so slowly as to seem to be crawling. It stood in sharp contrast with Dins, the Ills' visceral, occasionally violent 2006 debut LP. Catoptric, unlike either, seems to be facing upward-- it is spacey, expansive, almost devotional. Its tracks feel more purposeful, more sympathetic, more enveloping than Mirror Eye's wishy-washes, and despite running about half as long as its predecessor, it seems to push further.
The raga-like opener "Transmute" swirls and chirps, its chanty vocals low in the mix, underpinned by an amniotic gurgle. It's the busiest, most live-in-a-room track here, and it manages to hold its shape through five spherical minutes. The thuddier, buzzier "Secret Flower" has kind of a sonar Pink Floyd vibe to it, tumbling along wobbly on a krautrock groove. It's the weakest of Catoptric's four songs, falling into a lockstep that seems to hold on maybe a minute or so too long, but it's still got a sense of purpose. And then there's the smoky "Indus Echo", which rides a series of long, slow pulses into a telescopic tabla-bump trance. The band's Eastern influences are in full effect on the track, but here as on "Transmute", they wear them well.
But it's the outer spaceways of "Outvocation" that make Catoptric worth the trip. The slowly mutating track sounds like a slow-mo spacecraft hovering overhead, pausing to gurgle out some coded messages. It feels steely, stark, and infinite, building to a truly ominous throb toward its conclusion before pulling back as patiently as it arrived. And patience really does seem to be the difference between the Catoptric tracks and the lesser Mirror Eye material. Still, even on the most successful tracks here, Psychic Ills do seem to be stuck on the cusp of something without ever quite arriving at it. There's a kind of compositional blankness on display, a nagging feeling that what you're really hearing is long series of intros and outros rather than the songs themselves. But that suits the cutting room vibe of Catoptric just fine.
