Instrumental psych-rock improvisers
Mythic Sunship were tuned into the spirit of cosmic jazz from the beginning, going so far as to name their band by joining fragments of
Sun Ra and
John Coltrane album titles. While certainly free, early albums were a far cry from free jazz, leaning more toward Krautrock and doomy space rock influences. With
Another Shape of Psychedelic Music, the band turns a corner, with the addition of saxophonist Søren Skov and collaborations with producer/multi-instrumentalist
Jonas Munk bringing new dimensions of searching, anger, and peace to the band's palette. Clearly students of the '60s and '70s Impulse! Records catalog,
Mythic Sunship begin this sprawling collection with "Resolution," a floating evocation that starts out in A Love Supreme territory and soon mutates into something more closely resembling
Space Ritual-era
Hawkwind. The band has always defaulted to high-energy grooves, but the addition of Skov's circular sax freakouts and a brighter production give its repetitive pulses an almost spiritual feeling.
Munk sits in on two songs, the polyrhythmic meditation "Backyard Ritual" and the cavernous guitar heroics of "Out There." The album's 75-minute running time is made up of just six tracks, most of which climb past the 12-minute mark. Though not all of the album is slow-burning mind expansion ("Last Exit" charges out of the gates in a frenzied blitz of noisy skronk), the songs largely take their time to get where they're going, slowly rising to a boil as the rhythm section does its best to wrangle in the guitar and sax lines that are ascending ever upward. This kind of repetitive rock-based improvisation can often offer the listener something to zone out to while the noodling flies fast and loose, but the dynamic interplay between instruments and the players' dialed-in attention to space deliver something more compelling. The album melds the driven questing of free jazz with the ungrounded abandon of doom, twisting this hybrid through moments of new age ambience, Afro-beat-tinged rhythmic hyperactivity, and proto-metal distortion worship. With
Another Shape of Psychedelic Music,
Mythic Sunship fully realize the potential for a cross-pollinated approach to intensely searching music that was only strived for on past releases. Sounding more confident, ambitious, and in focus than ever before, this expansive collection flies by and merits multiple listens to get to the center of its dense compositions and layered emotional currents. ~ Fred Thomas