Welsh band SENDELICA have been around for close to a decade at this point, a band more renowned in psychedelic rock circles than in their native Wales from what I understand. They are an active live and recording unit, with close to a dozen full length productions to their name as of 2014. “The Megaliths” is a collection of material recorded between 2008 and 2012, and was released in December 2013.
This collection of material is a fairly mammoth one. It is sold either has a double CD clocking in at 2 hours or as a limited 3 CD set (now sold out) with an additional half hour of material. This latter version is also the one sold digitally. As the second part of the album title indicates this is a collection of material created as soundtracks, and as such this production isn’t readily comparable to the other releases by this band as far as overall style is concerned.
Soundtrack music, real soundtrack music that is, is something radically different from other types of music, at least in my book. This is music that generally should have more of a subservient nature to them, enhancing an experience that revolves around images. If it is a documentary or a cinema movie, the role of the music is to enhance whatever is happening on screen without doing it in a manner that takes away the focus from the story told by the images. In reality the case isn’t quite as black and white of course, as a long line of hit songs given plenty of space in cinema features over the years have documented, but in general that is the ideal. One of the best movie and music experiences of this kind I can recall is The Sixth Sense and how the soundtrack truly enhanced the overall experience on that occasion whilst still staying mostly unobtrusive.
The interesting question is how music of this kind manage to engage outside of the movie it has been made for. Does it work also in it’s own right? In some cases soundtrack music can be quite the tasteful experience as standalone entities, the main theme from the classic sci-fi movie Blade Runner comes to mind, in other cases the impressions aren’t quite as favorable. Some of this obviously comes down to individual taste obviously, as is the case with music in general. On this collection of material my experience is that we’re provided with most varieties here. Some of the material is strong, consistent and have a distinct presence that makes them enjoyable experiences in their own right, others comes across as music with more of a marginal scope.
With one exception the compositions here all revolve around fairly mellow landscapes, with limited drums or percussion effects involved at best. Plucked guitars, careful cosmic effects and careful and deliberate guitar soloing are the main starts of the show, with the saxophone given some runs here and there as the main additional effect. Voice effects enhance some of these dampened cosmic journeys, but never in a dramatic manner. The word unobtrusive fits the greater majority of the material, and words like frail and delicate describe the greater majority of the material explored.
Trillian Eight is probably the track here that for me represents the least interesting scope of the material best. I have no doubts at all that it functioned brilliantly as a soundtrack feature, but the loose jam aspect of this creation along with it’s overall unobtrusive nature didn’t make the cut for me as far as being an interesting number in it’s own right. This is the kind of track that to my mind cries out for the images it was made to support. While the song does intensify in sections when it reach the final third it is too little and too late for my personal taste in music at that point. That we’re dealing with a track that is just a wee bit shy of the half hour mark is probably a detail that warrants a mention here I guess.
It’s not that Sendelica is a band that are unable to create interesting material that stretch on a bit, as well documented by the Pink Floyd meets Hawkwind and then Hawkwind meets Robin Trower opening twenty or so minutes of the concluding half hour marathon When the Falling Angels Meet the Rising Apes, but Sendelica sounds much better when they are able to do so in the more dramatic, intense and audible manner of this creation and not quite as interesting when they revolve around a more unobtrusive and ambient oriented foundation.
To Create Is Divine is one of the highlights here, the distinct bassline used throughout this piece and the clever guitar details giving this song a stringer nerve and spirit than many of the other songs here, and the subtly more Hawkwind sounding I Don’t Wanna Be Your Satori another creation that managed to elevate itself in my ears due to more nerve, more contrast an a character that generally shies away somewhat from being mainly unobtrusive.
This doesn’t make “The Megaliths” a poor production though, as the various soundscapes are all excellently assembled, quite a few of them featuring delicate instrument details on top of what sounds like more or less loosely improvised jams that have been mixed down to have a distant and subservient place in the arrangements. It’s more a case of material with more of a marginal scope and reach, at least in my opinion. If you enjoy ambient material of the psychedelic and cosmic flavored kind and really enjoy immersing yourself in the mood and feel of such material without being distracted by dramatic impulses then this production is one you should take note of, and much the same can be said if you tend to enjoy careful, delicate material of the psychedelic and cosmic kind.
My rating: 58/100
