Working under the name
Astrel K
,
Rhys Edwards
of the indie rock group
Ulrika Spacek
made a splash with the 2022 album
Flickering i
. Maybe not a splash exactly, more like the sound it makes when one slips into a warm bath as candlelight flickers on the bathroom wall. It was intimate and fragile, built on subtle instrumentation, subtle electronics, and
Edwards
' melancholic croon. Songs were influenced by sources as disparate as the tender sweep of
Broadcast
at their quietest and the sleep-induced moodiness of slowcore groups like
Bedhead
, and the whole album had a kind of warmth and inner glow that felt like a shared secret. With the second
album,
turns that all on its head in many ways. While the songs are still small moments of emotional disclosure wrapped up in careful singing and precise lyrics, the music surrounding them has gone technicolor. Inspired by albums like
Leonard Cohen
's
Death of a Ladies' Man
or the late-'90s work of
Mercury Rev
likewise takes an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach in order to push the emotion of the song to its natural limits through the use of strings, horns, synths, piano, and massive amounts of echo. It's a choice that mostly works, as
manages to hold his own against the high-tide whoosh of sound, holding down the emotional center with all his might. It might take the listener a couple of songs to come to terms with the idea that, unlike on the first album where songs often calmly crawled to a closer with a sign, here they might end with masses of strings sawing away or steel drums pounding or clouds of echo filling the sound spectrum. There are times, too, when it comes close to the more standard kind of indie rock
seemed quite keen to avoid previously, but that's not a bad thing since he proves able to turn those tropes into something exciting (as on the churning "A Rudderless Ship") or sweet (on the swaying retro-soul-adjacent ballad "Darkness at Noon"). Mostly, the record sounds like a deluxe version of
, where
has delved deep into his paintbox, pulled out all the colors he can, then applied them with just the right style and shading. The extra layers of echo and haze work wonders on the album's more psychedelic numbers like "Brighter Spells," the zinging noises that pierce the chunky chords of tracks like "Heavy Is the Head" are exhilarating, and
' use of piano, which pops up on many songs, never strays into mawkish territory since it's always surrounding by swirls of sound. The whole album is a perfect blend of whispered intimacies, heart-tugging melodies, widescreen production, and perfectly chosen instrumentation that shows that
is able to succeed whether the setting is as lo-fi and contained as
or as big and expansive as the setting is here on
The Foreign Department
. ~ Tim Sendra