(Inertia)

Sydney sound sculptors soar to new heights on fourth album

There is a flowing grace to Decoder Ring’s new instrumental double album, right down to allowing the songs to bleed into one another, giving the record an almost symphonic feel. Disc one track one is Beat The Twilight, a perfect introduction with its blend of atmospheric synths and graceful guitar rock. The title track swells and emotes like a Godfrey Reggio film on an Imax screen. Charlotte Rampling ought to be delighted with the sweeping, panoramic track named in her honour – and may well ask why ex-husband Jean Michel Jarre never came up with such a lovely instrumental tribute. Still beautiful, there is also an almost My Bloody Valentine queasiness to the epic 100 Suns. That’s just some of the highlights of disc one. Disc two takes an ethereal deviation from the more band-oriented first CD, relying on sonic texture instead of rhythm or melody. Same Old Paradise is over 11 minutes of beatless electronics, droning and divebombing like the alien choir emanating from the monolith in 2001 – it’s ambient music with a delicious, otherworldly sense of unease. The Horse And The Hand Grenade is rendered even more spectral, with a chilly wind-like pulse providing a ghostly, wordless mantra, before ending in a monolithic wall of sound. The 14-minute All The Streams Have Little Glitches In Them is gentler, the electronic sketches reaching womb-like tranquility. Final track The Inland Sea has an especially evocative title, particularly coming from an Australian group – the lonely airiness of the piece evokes the imagined central Australian body of water that motivated inland exploration in 1820s and 1830s. A suitably haunting finale to this landmark in Australian electronica.

*****

MATT THROWER

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