The latest from Poland's Mort Douce is named after a poem by John Siddique. Given the title, I expected to be besieged with insect chittering or else the maddening rush of descending swarms. Instead, the sounds are almost geological, like dropping a microphone into the center of the Earth and amplifying minute tectonic shifts, documenting the secret life of continents.
What first struck me when listening to this album was how it evokes an epic sense of space. "Dream of Better Days" begins with what could be the industrial clatter of a steel refinery reverberating in vast halls of feedback and suffering a slow death. "Beneath the Flesh" could be a geologic gasp, like a crumbling ice shelf, and "All Stripped Down" evokes larges bodies of colliding minerals. Things get more cosmic with "A Flash Flood in the Night," which evokes the radar blips of a moon landing while debris bounces off of a vessel in low gravity as faint bits of melody are drowned in gaseous swirls. The brief "Sun in My Hand" continues the outer space vibe, as if howling interstellar wind is stressing the metal of an orbiting satellite.
The album's only misstep is "Coarse State of Saturn." It starts with rasping, swirling sounds and deep tones that are soon overwhelmed, if not hijacked outright, by a wearisome high pitch that induces headaches and makes dogs howl. Unfortunately, this annoying high pitch overpowers and obscures most of everything else occurring on the track, which is otherwise dense with activity. Still, it's only one track of six and doesn't spoil the album's stronger material.
Succinct and deliberate, Locust Dreams makes its point without any unnecessary fluff or padding. A definite step forward, it's easily the best thing I've heard yet from Mort Douce.
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