Vertigo of Flaws… - Trees Speak (2022)

Officially titled “Vertigo of Flaws: Emancipation of the Dissonance and Temperaments in Irrational Waveforms” but I’m not going to put all that in the post title.

When I search for these guys the terms that come up a lot are “Kosmische” and “Psych”, and I suppose those both fit fine. There are also mentions of “Post-punk” which seems more about the vibe than the actual resulting music. I would add post-rock to that, because this reminds me heavily of Grails in places. There’s a feel of nu-jazz, like The Comet Is Coming. And one more obvious touchpoint in some places is 80s horror movie soundtracks, like John Carpenter’s.

As you can see, this is not a record that’s wedged deep down in some sub-genre crevasse. It’s free-wheeling and varies wildly from track to track. And there are a lot of tracks: 29, for a total runtime of over 80 minutes.

The downside of this is that none of it is incredibly memorable to me. It’s groovy and fun, but mostly throwaway in nature. There’s no real development of melody or structure or much of anything. It might be mistaken for a sampler pack of beats and loops to drop into Garage Band.

But it will be good for what i call “concentration music”: music I can have on while working that keeps my head bobbing without being too distracting.

Tracks I Liked:

Interference - a straightforward organic groove.

Halide Crystals - the first one that really made me think of John Carpenter

Opticks - a little more up-tempo and rockin’

Stasi - There’s an early U2 b-side whose name i can’t come up with that has a lot of the same energy.