Peaking Lights – Lucifer
(Mexican Summer/Weird World)

Beyond the questionable hippie blather they’ve been dishing out in interviews, Aaron Coyes and Idra Dunis remain extremely canny music makers. In pre-release, they pegged ‘Lucifer’ as a “nocturnal” version of their ‘936’ LP’s blazing day-time, and indeed, it sounds as if the group have pulled a straight aesthetic switch here without actually changing a thing, solarising the negative of their sound - same basic ingredients, but with the colours and contours completely reversed for deep night-time ambience. Clever buggers.

The first thing fans of ‘936’ will notice when hitting up ‘Lucifer’ for the first time is that it’s a lot less immediate than its predecessor. The melodic hooks and monster bass lines that stood out there are submerged here, boiled down into a flat, sleep deprived kind of haze. Initially, this is worrying – the preponderance of wind chimes n’ wood blocks in the intro cut do not bode well, and when the main vocal line on proper lead-off track ‘Beautiful Son’ kicks in, sounding like a pale and slightly cloying echo of ‘936’s triumphant ‘All The Sun That Shines..’, things are not lookin’ good.

First couple of listens, ‘Lucifer’ sticks stubbornly to the background – thin and vaguely insipid. Give it time though – sip some whisky, open the windows for a bit of summer night breeze – once you’ve lived with it a few days, there is much goodness to be unlocked. Through their career to date, Peaking Lights have specialised in making tracks that sound kinda bulbous and disconcerting for their first few bars, but that will have you transfixed by the 30 second mark, convinced the song’s been playing in yr head since the dawn of time. Here they’re just working that technique on a grander scale, dialling down immediate eyebrow raisers like stuttering lo-fi drum loops and lumpy bass blurts in favour of gentler mood-wobblers – electric piano, slightly shakey tremolo guitar – and waiting for you to come to them.

Dig for the detail beneath the wipe-clean surface though, and before you know it you’ll be lost in the byzantine detail of the stunning ‘Dream Beat’ and the bonged out echo drift of the aptly-named ‘Cosmic Tides’. The most whacked of black ark-era dub once again becomes a viable touchstone, as disconcertingly dense lost-in-the-street-market kinda vibes start to hit heavy on ‘Midnight (in the Valley of Shadows)’. By the time the full-on alien exotica of ‘LO HI’ kicks in, it’s clear that if ‘Lucifer’ is a bit more elusive in its appeal than previous Peaking Lights records, it’s also a heck of a lot weirder, with the second side in particular full of deliciously peculiar textures that flit in and out of the mix like passing asteroids, anchored only by Dunis’s sing-song vocal lines, flattened here to the point where they almost acquire a sinisterly robotic edge, only regaining their previously comforting aura once they’ve been whacked through the echoplex, lone syllables hurtling off into deep, dark space.

Thinking about it, it’s odd that they should choose to name their ‘night time’ record after Lucifer the light bringer. But then, he’s also the ‘falling star’, which is kind of a night time thing? I guess..? And….. fuck it, who cares. Maybe you can ask them about it if you ever up doing an interview. Or read an old Alan Moore comic or something. I dunno. In the meantime just settle back and enjoy the tunes.

Labels: album reviews, late night listening, Peaking Lights