cymbient - Out On The Waves

is a record coming directly from the Coast - the West Coast? No, the Welsh Coast, but one could be easily mistaken by the pop and folk sound of this second album (following up 2005’s ‘The Drive Home’). The Cardiff-based five-piece, who already played Bristol’s Cube Cinema and the Green Man Festival, and created its own label (Surk Recordings), is actually a group of visual artists - a particularity which not only produces a very nice sleeve (the included leaflet displays art works by each member of the band), but also a many-hued album.

’Cymbient’ does sound like ‘ambient’, and, when first hearing the gentle, clean sound of ‘Dress The Salad’ and the ethereal voice of Ann Summerhayes, there is cause for alarm. But their music is in fact much deeper than that, and much more interesting. One is amazed by the architecture of each song, by their inner structure that rests both on repetition and on evolution - at a time when many wannabes build their music on the former, and totally forget the latter. This is all the more striking in purely instrumental tracks: this ‘Funky Little One’, for instance, which recalls something of Captain Beefheart’s talent (and humour) and sounds like some kind of collage uniting coherently a very 60s-like guitar, duck-sounding keyboards and little electro beats.

After the first six tracks, one is definitely enthusiastic, but begins to be bored by the slightly-too-clean something of it all: it’s nice, but it sounds a bit like Islands without the energy to get up and dance; or like the Dandy Warhols without the rock’n’roll; or like The Brian Jonestown Massacre without… the genius. ‘Truculent’ arrives then just in time: a very different track, another colour, with something harder and uncannier in it - not the most convincing track though, but definitely evidence that the band is able to go beyond their apparent motto of softness and slowness. And indeed, even in very innocent, romantic songs, you can now uncover a hidden sadness, a sense of tragic that gives the album its relevance. ‘Why Are You Still Sleeping’ seems to be a direct reference to the Velvet Underground’s ‘Sunday Morning’ (how not to make a reference to the Velvet Underground nowadays, you may ask), never forgetting that the happiness stupidly floating around is eerie in itself.

The album ends with ‘Insightful Sounds’: once again, music meets sight, sounds are colours - a synaesthetic project, that makes cymbient’s music profoundly intellectual, probably too intellectual for those who only like dirty screamy rock music, but certainly pleasant to everyone, and even beautiful to many.