Label: Karisma Records
Release date: June 19, 2020
Production: Airbag
Album length: 48.07 min
Genre: Space Rock / Progressive Rock
Rating: 9.0/10
Buy the album!
So what’s that trippy, dreamlike experience that carries you off into a sweetly esoteric, transcendental (maybe even out-of-body) state, riding a surging weave of rustling synths, repetitive “looping,” and wailing, long-ringing guitar notes? A tightly measured voyage that fills mostly the mid harmonic register of its chosen soundscape and gives you goosebumps? Norwegian space prog rockers Airbag know that answer very well.
The band has been around for some 15 years, though its beginnings reach back to 1994, and it has tons of experience from playing in the Pink Floyd tribute act The Pink Floyd Experience. This year it’s back with its fifth release, “A Day at the Beach”.
The album is heralded by a phenomenal cover, designed in the Hipgnosis tradition, which instantly brings to mind Porcupine Tree, Pink Floyd and Marillion. And interestingly enough, just one look at the cover already gives you a first answer to what you can expect from the music on the new Airbag release (too). A sandy beach bathing in a juicy sunset, thickly strewn with plush teddy bears buried up to their necks in fine-grained sand. With very timely symbolism, given what humanity is going through on a global level.
Opener Machines and Men signals that this is an album of stylistic departure compared with the previous four. After a gradual entrance into the track, held up by a swelling opening tone, shortly before the two-minute mark the song morphs into a rhythmic march propped up by the heavy bass of guest bassist Kristian Karl Hultgren of the Norwegian progressive rock band The Wobbler, who builds the hypnosis up with a “new wave” and even “shoegaze” attitude straight out of eighties alternative rock, which will definitely surprise anyone familiar with Airbag’s body of work so far. What the opening track hints at plays out across the rest of the new album. On their fifth release, Airbag have stepped away from obsessively copying Pink Floyd and finally found their true album. Their own. Interestingly, though, before putting this album out the band first “regressed” from a quintet to a trio. It may even have been necessary for them to reach for a more mature broadening of their musical artistry.
Bjørn Riis, the visionary and leader of the band, certainly reaches for the typical “Gilmouresques,” which stand out in the fascinating outro of the second part of the title track. Interestingly, the so-called “Floydisms” lean more toward the “Divison Bell” era than the Roger Waters era, which comes down to the compositional style as well as the modern production, in which the contrasts between the building blocks of the sonic picture are strongly magnified (intensified). That’s why you need to listen to this album with headphones. In peace and with pleasure. In that well-known sweet anticipation when you hit the point where the album grabs you irreversibly and totally hooks you with its sound.
Airbag are masters of their craft. They lay down clear, simple, tightly measured compositional steps that tolerate no fragmentation or quirky experimental detours that might wander into avant-prog territory. This band has never handled atonal figures very well, and it still doesn’t. By peeling away from the excessive resemblance to Pink Floyd, they bring more sensible comparisons to the fore, with groups rooted in alternative rock artistry like Radiohead and, on the other side, even The Pineapple Thief. The difference is that “A Day at the Beach” unmistakably marks a turning point for the band, the moment it finally found its recognizable style and sound. The album sails on rustling curtains of synths, contrastingly backed by the coiled-up rhythm section, added programmed loops and “echo delay” effects layering the sonic strata, which together thicken the soundscapes they create. The pronounced element of melancholy is further intensified by Asle Tostrup’s “broken,” at times downright “crushed” vocals.
The chemistry is there and the album grips hard. From the first second to the last, it’s anything but a lighthearted romp, and with it Airbag stake out new territory in their artistic evolution. In grand style. About time, too.
Tracklist:
1. Machines and Men
2. A Day at the Beach (Part 1)
3. Into the Unknown
4. Sunsets
5. A Day at the Beach (Part 2)
6. Megalomaniac
Line-up:
Asle Tostrup – vocals
Bjørn Riis – guitar
Henrik Fossum – drums
Guest musician:
Kristian Karl Hultgren – bass guitar
