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Review: The Octopus Project's Dreamy new EP, 'Golden Beds'
Oscillating joyfully between the skeletal and meaty in the vein of Blonde Redhead, Golden Beds is a charming setpiece from a band who continually delights with their mastery of musical mis-en-scene. It’s fantastical but also familiar, as if they were climbing into your head and nonchalantly performing feng-shui on your ears.
Golden Beds’ opening track, “Wet Gold,” bears their signature buoyancy, dishing up wispy vocals floating on benzodiazepine-laced instrumentation. It’s this kind of shimmery, friendly-ghost-conjuring formula that makes The Octopus Project so suggestive of mental images like tiny stone pagodas glowing in Japanese tea gardens.
“Moon Boil” sounds like a commercial jingle smothered under a distorted anti-message overlay. This isn’t an EP signaling new trajectories, just further expansion of an intriguing territory. The Octopus Project's songs frequently sound self-contained, encased in a glossy veneer, and contracting even when their volume expands; maybe this is the secret to their vacuum-like magnetism. With a penchant for outer space-y flourishes, songs like “Rorol” come across like the noise from a cocktail party in a spacecraft’s airlock.
Not to confine the scope of their talent at all, but Octopus Project’s ability to carve out small, intimate spaces with their music make for a kind of electronic chamber music; it’s a delightfully domestic sphere, nestled cozily in the woven textures of sound. Few listeners will pass by this EP without curling up in at least one of its tracks. And maybe that’s the entire draw; in a scene recently dominated by operatic edicts and high drama from such bands as Arcade Fire and The Decemberists, who can resist the warm, detached glow of the anti-histrionic?
