Eternal Tapestry - A World Out of Time

Thrill Jockey must be feeling particularly chuffed with Eternal Tapestry's prolific output, as A World Out of Time follows on from Dawn in 2 Dimensions, a record they slipped out earlier in the year. Mind you, it's doubtful that a band like Eternal Tapestry need must coaxing to record some music; a band clearly in love with what they do. I can imagine their shelves at home heaving under the weight of well-worn records by obscure psychedelic bands and strange folk collectives. The band's sound, while undeniably psychedelic, is fairly hard to pin down and this record finds them in a very different space to the blissed-out sounds of 2011 masterpiece Beyond the 4^thDoor.

It's safe to say that twelve-minute opener 'When I Was in Your Mind' sounds like nothing else I've heard this year. The band dive head-first into a rhythmic, psych-funk jam that sounds like improv mentalist Sun-Ra jamming with 70s funk-subversives Funkadelic. This track in particular marks the bands biggest departure from the meditative sounds of their wonderful Beyond the 4th Door LP.

Eternal Tapestry are genuinely experimental and aren't going to restrict themselves to sounds they've accomplished on previous records. A World Out of Time is a difficult record to take in on first listen but persevere and the apparent chaos starts to blend into something rather special.

Highlights include the swirling psychedelics and crashing cymbals of 'Alone Against Tomorrow' and the fuzzy-feedback garage rock experimentation of 'When Gravity Fails'. Ultimately, however, this is an album to enjoy in its entirety, a free-form dive into the unknown. While there are certainly many fantastic psychedelic bands around at the moment, Eternal Tapestry seem to belong to a lineage that begins with avant-garde experimentalists the Far East Family Band and the mighty Les Rallizes Denudes.

It's not like Eternal Tapestry actually sound like any of these bands; it's just that, for want of a less cliché ridden phrase, they're the 'real deal'. Eternal Tapestry pour so much into their music, they wouldn't know how to be half arsed or 'phone-in' a performance if they tried. If they did 'phone-it-in', then it would surely be from some gigantic, intergalactic spaceship made almost exclusively out of vinyl records and king size blue Rizla's. Anyway, I digress.

Perhaps the albums biggest surprise comes with closing piece 'Sand Into Rain' where the band give us a rather beautiful folk song, complete with actual vocals. The song sits somewhere between Fairport Convention and Syd Barrett's melancholic meanderings and further emphasises the lack of boundaries in the bands musical vision. All of this makes guessing the bands next move nearly impossible- and isn't that refreshing? Eternal Tapestry will bring your tiny world crashing down around your ears and you'll thank them for it.