Eyes of the Amaryllis

Perceptible to Everyone

Genre: MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT

LP (Black Vinyl)

Boomkat Product Review:

Taking stylistic cues from vaporous New Weird America recordings, Smegma's freeform experimentation and Gareth Williams & Mary Currie's intimate, peerless Flaming Tunes material, Philly's Eyes of the Amaryllis stake out curious, alien territory on their latest set, using ramshackle instruments and ghosted, will-o-the-wisp vocals to draw us into a woozy parallel reality.

Since 2021's self-titled cassette, firm friends Esther Scanlund, Jim Strong, Goda Trakumaite and Jesse Dewlow have cautiously invited us to survey the deepest recesses of their minds with a steady stream of releases that have cracked open their unusual sonic universe. Last year's 'Sift' was a ferric approximation of wyrd jazz and Flying Nun-style burnout pop, and 'Perceptible to Everyone' continues the narrative, splaying the four-piece's songs into disordered trace drones and ephemeral echoes. They recorded the album "in various remote locations around the northeast of the US" last summer, and that sense of nomadic, rural wonder is omnipresent throughout.

On 'Waterproof', a dimmed-out voice sings what might be a verse or a chorus - who knows - over fragmented organ chords, firelighters, bird calls and rattling percussion. The music seems almost too comfortable with itself, and that's its magnetism; there's no posturing or any attempt to make the sounds palatable, we just get to experience interactions in glorious real time, like a kind of outsider music, experienced from the inside.

Sometimes it's a warm-hearted invitation to break bread, like on the comforting vignette 'Dinner is Waiting', like a shortwave radio fritzing out at teatime, and at others we're hit with more discernible song forms. On 'The Room Fills With Smoke', plucked strings almost form a melody while muggy ecclesiastic chords boil into birdsong, and 'ER Parking Lot Pastoral' is rickety cave rock lifted from the moss into concrete, reverberating thru the empty urban sprawl.

What the band lack in polish, they make up for with pure feeling. It's an antidote to the plasticky perfection of so much contemporary experimental music, and while some of Eye of the Amaryllis' sounds are familiar (we hear traces of Fonal's forest folk, Thuja and Stroomy's most untamed epistles) few artists manage to expunge their stories with so much eccentric finesse.

A bit like listening to an opiated sesh that was never intended for public consumption, there's a loose-limbed, highly believable and relatable weirdness to 'Perceptible to Everyone' that just keeps us going back for more.

LP (Black Vinyl) (8)