���The amazing second album of malevolent, void-gazing space rock from Bremen, a Swedish duo that features Lanchy from hardcore legends Totalit�r and scum-punk gods Brainbombs. Like the title suggests, Second Launch sees the band returning to the interstellar void with this new collection of sprawling, hypnotic drone-rock trances, each one stretching out for ten minutes or more as the music spills out across throbbing two-note bass riffs and wailing, delay-streaked guitar, the sound tumbling through the starlit blackness, suspended above the drummer's slow, steady, almost motorik beat, as the band chases after some sort of ego-obliteration in the face of the unfathomable immensity of space. That opening song "Entering Phase Two" alone had me glazing over completely, the simple, ominous cosmic howl sounding like some stripped-down, intensely sinister version of Hawkwind, fading in and out of view as waves of solar whoosh and glimmering organs sweep over the hypnotic ticktock pulse.
��� The rest of Launch is just as goddamn terrific as that opener, from there drifting further out into the cosmos into washes of gorgeously glistening vibrato and warm organ pulse found on "Hollow Wave", singing with clusters of twinkling piano, and then into swells of murky orchestral drift and bursts of deep-space radio fuzz, lush guitar chords slowly ringing out over fragile music-box melodies, down through the spacious whirr of "Static Interferences" that slips into even vaster, more kosmische realms of lush synthdrone. The atmosphere on Launch dances between vast cosmic mystery and a darker, more dread filled feeling of wonder, locking into mesmeric looping ambience and moody, Western-tinged guitars, glitchy keyboard sounds scattered across the emptiness like fragments of communication signals. There's huge stretches of the album where the music drops away from any kind of percussive propulsion, so that when the minimal pulse of the drums do finally reappear, their sudden presence injects an immediate feeling of tension into the music; when the brief krautrock blast of "Sweepers" drifts in halfway through the album, it brings with it a sense of grim urgency that makes it one of the album's more memorable moments, even though the thing is only a couple minutes long. Elsewhere, Bremen's use of those soft, lush washes of tangy Western guitar almost seems to evoke Pentastar-era Earth, as do the softly chugging mono-riffs and noodly synths that hover over these swirling gyres of black-hole drift and repetitious church organs, like some kind of blues-stained Lynchian space rock. And on songs like the lovely lunar psychedelia of "Walking The Skies" or the elegant gothic glow of "Voxnan", or those gorgeous Badalamenti-like strings that shimmer across the closer "Sun Son", you'd be easily forgiven for forgetting that this came from one of the guys behind the dreaded 'Bombs. It's a far cry from the abject sludge-punk of those guys, though not without it's own simmering darkness. Comes in gatefold packaging.