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Bremen, "Second Launch"
This sprawling double-album is the second release from this Swedish guitar/organ space-rock duo and it absolutely floored me. Built primarily from improvisations, Bremen largely avoids most of the jamminess, heavy-handedness, and self-indulgence that normally make me want to avoid the genre.  At their worst, they offer up a pleasantly languorous and simmering strain of post-rock, but the handful of highlights on Second Launch are nuanced, haunting, slow-burning perfection. The best moments are easily some of the finest music that I have heard this year even though the complete album perhaps errs a bit on the sleepy and too-long side.
The most immediately distinctive and striking aspect about this duo of organist Jonas Tijander and guitarist Lanchy Orre (both from Brainbombs) is that they are only a duo, which makes for an unusually sparse and drum-less aesthetic that suits their droning and dark psychedelia beautifully. Actually, it is not quite immediately striking, as the epic opener "Entering Phase Two" deceptively replicates a full band in total flange-heavy, Hawkwind-style space rock glory, a feat that is later repeated with significant variation on the Neu!-worship of "Sweepers."  While both of those pieces are surprisingly enjoyable and assured pastiches, Bremen are much more compelling when they sound like only themselves, which is generally a mingling of flanging, phase-shifting organ drones and dark swells of atmospheric guitar.  Apparently, Nico was a significant influence, which makes sense: Second Launch's brooding instrumentals are certainly spiritual kin to her bleaker, harmonium-based albums. While that may not sound especially novel, the magic is in the details and the execution and Lanchy and Jonas clearly spent a lot of time overdubbing and editing their improvisations into dynamic and satisfying compositions.
The first hint that Bremen is onto something special comes with the second song, the 11-minute "Hollow Wave."  Built primarily from a warmly reverberating two-chord organ motif, the piece gradually blossoms into something mesmerizingly beautiful as the organ is joined by melancholy washes of shimmering guitar and stuttering piano twinkle. To their credit, Bremen avoid the expected trajectory of escalating density and instead maintain a simmering tension through a constantly shifting ebb and flow.  I also appreciate Tijander’s brief, yet restrained flurry of dissonant, chromatic piano cascades, which is something that seems to be outside the accepted palette for this style of music.
Happily, "Hollow Wave" was not a mere fluke, as the duo manage to rack up another three triumphs before Second Launch eventually winds to a close.  On "They Were Drifting," Orre delivers a smoldering and mournful haze of guitar sizzle over a chopped-up and panning synth bed and an insistent tom thump.  "Pace of Time" is similarly guitar-centric, as Orre unspools a woozy, tremolo-swooping almost-melody over a slowly chugging chord progression and an omnipresent organ hum. "Pace" is then followed by the album's probable highlight, the 10-minute "Walking the Skies," which marries Tijander’s dreamily repeating two-chord organ theme with warbling, mournful guitar that sounds a hell of a lot like a whale song.  Those two things go remarkably well together (and whales are inherently much cooler than guitars).
That said, Second Launch admittedly has a few significant faults, as it is a bit exhausting and uneven as a whole.  Also, a few songs are a bit toothless ("Threshold Crossing") or overstay their welcome (the 15-minute "Static Interferences").  On balance, however, most of the album is quite strong and an industrious listener like myself can easily create an album-length edit of the best pieces, as a lot of bloat can be chopped from a two-hour album.  Of course, songs that seem needlessly long to me might seem delightfully absorbing to someone else—there are certainly a couple of songs that I could listen to in an endless loop for hours.  It all depends on the strength of the central motif and what Bremen do with it, I guess.  I appreciate that they are confident enough to gamble with my attention span and would not want them to change their approach at all.  While I cannot quite give Second Launch an unreserved recommendation, I can definitely say that it blindsided me, as I had not heard of Bremen a month ago and now I am listening to them constantly.
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