Bremen - Eclipsed

Once again, Sweden’s Bremen duo set their sights on a dusky horizon with Eclipsed, their expansive 2nd album for Blackest Ever Black and 3rd in a rather collectible catalogue since 2013. Amid the label’s disparate yet cohesive roster, Bremen’s lissom, sprawling psych/prog/kraut projections represent a certain sort of astral-highway-hungry sehnsucht; a road romance for long haul truckers from Twin Peaks as much as an armchair cartography. In 90 minutes it covers light years between the stars/service stations/drizzly lay-bys, getting On Board with pent two-note piano refrain and hacked guitar riffs opening out into soaring strings, and slipping into cruise mode with Helmet to travel the sorrowful Scorched Earth, which could be right out of a Jodorwsky soundtrack, before putting some Hawkwind-style riff bluster behind their sails with Through The Barrier. At the album's apex, they distill the cold harsh reality of life on the road/life alone in The Art of Non Existence with its strung-out, linear trajectory leading to a heart-breaking denouement of gallic symphonies and struggling CB radio crackle, before the record’s 2nd half takes in the hard-bitten, grinding riffs of Events and Non Events and the resolute roadhouse blues of A Stumble Not A Fall in its stride to scan the rocky drone vistas of A Glimpse At The Final Moment and the late night, neon downtown appeal of Sick City, arriving at the psychic depot with a sagely Wendy Carlos synth nod called Lights Out, and the gently lysergic, end-of-the-trip glow in Soaring With The Mountains.