Chandeen: Mercury Retrograde - VINYL LP

Chandeen SKU: 39956385
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Title:

Mercury Retrograde

Artist:

Chandeen

Label:

Kalinkaland

Product Type:

VINYL LP

UPC:

4250137249568

Genre:

Rock

Release Date:

2020-02-28

Number of Discs:

1

Launched three decades ago, Harald Lwy's enduring German indie-tronic dreamcore project Chandeen is now gearing up for the release of it's 10th album, Mercury Retrograde. A carefully paced and deeply satisfying journey, Mercury Retrograde begins in earnest with Summer's Fling, a persistent, shimmering instrumental track that showcases perennial Chandeen collaborator Florian Walther's intrepid, David Gilmour-channeling space-rock guitar flourishes. Vanish follows, weaving acoustic and electric guitars into a romantic, vibey patchwork that becomes a blanket for ominous lyrics and breathy vocals that wouldn't sound out of place escaping the lips of Hope Sandoval on a classic Mazzy Star record. The bittersweet letting go of I Don't Care if I'm Wasted continues to blend Mercury Retrograde's disparate synthetic and organic elements, Walther anchoring the tune with some entrancingly melodic runs on his Hfner-style Beatle bass. And toward album's end, semi-spoken manifesto Cause It's Slow floats along, propelled by sputtering drums, eventually fading into the cosmos like an astronaut on an ill-fated spacewalk. Mercury Retrograde is an unapologetic downtempo-burner, heavy with the gravity of fate, but at once weightless and sparse enough to allow one's imagination to fill in the blank spaces between notes, making for a highly personalized listen. Each distinct vocalist featured on the album-Chandeen lead singer Julia Beyer, British composer/multi-instrumentalist Holly Henderson, sad-eyed French singer-songwriter KITTY, and 16-year-old German artist Odile-as well as guest songwriter Jennifer Pague, contributed their own lyrics, always keeping Mercury Retrograde's titular winged-messenger traveling east to west in their minds, reckless and unrepentant. The perfectly calibrated soundscapes Lwy and Walther have created to score these star-slathered song-poems are a breathtaking fusion of ghostly psychedelic dreampop and barely tethered indie rock, all shot through with a delicate yet unwavering pop sensibility.

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