With multiple references to Dante and Virgil and lyrics that namecheck distant constellations, unnamed Sphinxes, Odessian forests, and Saturn's rings, it seems Odawas have selected Voyage and Return as their basic plot of choice. On their debut full-length The Aether Eater, the Indiana trio's music suffers from a similarly potent strain of wanderlust, as their loopy art-rock travels impulsively from cracked Heartland balladry to hyper-inflated space-age keyboard pomp at the blink of a faulty engine light. And though these cosmic tourists manage to locate some admittedly fantastic points of interest, their haphazard navigational powers might cause even the most stir-crazy listeners to wait for assistance from more reliable guides.
Co-authored by the group's multi-instrumentalists Michael Tapscott and Isaac Edwards, The Aether Eater seems to be loosely constructed around the fabulous exploits of a waylaid astronaut who's had himself several adventures in the nether regions of the galaxy, whether at "the back of Orion" or "the Tripton County Fair." Interspersed with his tales are a handful of appropriately stardust-fuelled instrumental passages, as well as "Benjamin" and "Kids", a pair of brief childhood recollections that are unsettling in the way that only creepy childhood recollections can be. ("You've heard the stories told from kids in school/ About a boy who went walking in the woods and he died. Kids!")
Though at various junctures the album points in vaguely baroque or folkish directions, it is primarily built on space-rock tracks like "The Golden Fog" and "The Unnamed Sphinx", where Edwards' ambient keyboards swell and undulate with gravity-defying splendor, while Tapscott's reedy, Neil Youngish pipes provide an unsteady torchlight through the celestial fog. And before things become overly familiar, Odawas also frequently include brief, seemingly arbitrary interjections of harmonica, flute, and harpsichord-- appearances whose unpredictability allows the listener little time to skim these placid waves on autopilot.
Strangest of all is "Ant Man Messiah Elijah", a trippy, partially spoken-word track that provides extensive exposition of the album's screwy narrative. "I will set my course for the Pangean Bones that lie past the sun with the Nebulan Horse," intones Tapscott, in the type of heavily-effected (perhaps backwards-masked?) delivery that one might associate with a David Lynch dream sequence. That cleared up, the group are again free to continue forth, leading the listener through "Behind the Moon" and "Song of Temptations", two tranquil, rather uneventful instrumentals that utilize dreamy guitar textures, bagfuls of sci-fi sound effects, and even a courtly, Dark Side of the Moon saxophone solo.
The album's journey ends logically enough with "Virgil", a track that serves as a tidy summary of last reminiscences ("Virgil was the best friend I'd had/ But he was a dream and I was a man") and lessons learned ("To be saved you can have no sympathy/ And to be alive I must often grieve.") And though there are points on The Aether Eater at which you find yourself cautiously glancing around for the escape hatch, Odawas at least have the courtesy to deliver you unharmed back where you started, but good luck finding anyone to believe your stories of the experience.
