Lunar Dunes
"FROM ABOVE" REVIEWS
"One can be sure, Lunar Dunes’ From Above is an album which without a doubt has the potential to reawaken all of the fellow psychedelic/spacey/kraut rock mammoths that seem to have been frozen for the last few decades. The musicians behind this record probably know how hard it is is to make a successful mix of old and new styles and simultaneously please all of the fans who are thirsty for more psychedelic music." - Prog Sphere
“A meandersome masterpiece, you’ll relish this loose limbed troupe of phantom flange flingers” – Classic Rock
“A modern variant on an English 60’s “head” album successfully transports Transglobal Underground to a 1967 Ladbroke Grove crash-pad …. A varied, melodic, gently deranging debut” – Uncut
“Every now and then something arrives in the post that just knocks us all sideways. Or, more importantly, makes us all just shut the fuck up and listen. From Above has just done that …. They’ve obviously digested everything from Parliament & Funkadelic to Black Sabbath and the entire output of Can and Neu!, but what they’ve managed to do is take all of that, mix it together and cook up the best tasting jam sandwich you’ve had in years. Guys, this is one hell of a trip.” – Incendiary Magazine
“From London comes the debut from Lunar Dunes, an instrumental psychedelic space rock band that really knows how to lay down a cosmic groove. At times they sound like a more acid rock version of Ozric Tentacles, and at others they reminded me of bands like Hidria Spacefolk, that are firmly in the space-psych realm, though the tight playing and solid musicianship gives the music a progressive rock edge as well. But they really excel at just laying down cool jamming melodic, meditative, mind massaging groove tunes.” – Roadburn
"Somewhere between Ladbroke Grove, Dusseldorf and Los Angeles lies the motherlode that Lunar Dunes have tapped into, and all credit to them for pulling it off with aplomb. Adam Blake is a good enough guitarist to transport the listener back to when it mattered, and the band as a whole are tight and effective enough to play the Progressive Rock card without a trace of irony. There are times, particularly early on in the album, when Lunar Dunes noodle off towards the bass-heavy, meditative festie groove dub sound personified by the Ozrics and a thousand minor imitations, but this is to be forgiven in the light of what follows. The drumming on here is fantastic as well; all in all, fabulous stuff and worth checking out. Regular readers will be just as taken with the earlier psych-space trance rhythms and lunar groove jams laid down by this ineffably tight little outfit. Definitely one to watch." - Terrascope
“This is out and out, gloriously over the top spacerock …. When they hit full speed and start dropping in all sorts of jazz rhythms and prog basslines, stretch out and show just how ludicrously talented they are, they're as mad as a roomful of hatters on an acid fuelled stag night” – Space Rock
“This album, recorded in a mere three days and seemingly having come from nowhere, is a really pleasant surprise. One of the best things I've heard all year in fact.” – Evil Sponge
"Pleasant flowing pleasing soothing mellow space/prog flavoured instrumental rock that would have fitted in well during the glory days of Club Dog ...... you’ll love this well recorded well played gentle album. Neat artwork as well" - Organ
“From Above remains an enjoyable yet complex listen, almost fascinating if you come to think of how note after note after note, the trio makes randomness a tangible reality. Holding a vintage sound, the congregation of genres manages to offer an uttermost refreshing experience, for as long as you can descry the rhythmically complex, deeply jazz rooted bass lines, the reminiscences of space rock and the characteristic krautrock experimentalism, you're not bound to be bored” – Silent Ballet
“These folks manage to combine great instrumentation with interesting music that is rhythmically complex, but in a way that never takes center stage away from the compositions. One of the year's best. 95/100” - Concrete Web
ABOUT LUNAR DUNES
"Why can't anybody play music like that? Why can't you or I? What makes them so special? Well theoretically anybody can play like that. All it takes is insane persistence and a total disregard for everything but getting that yawp out if you gotta howl at the moon, and most folks aren't going to howl at the moon just to prove a point. You probably ain’t got the balls to do it." - Lester Bangs, December 1971
Born out of 100 years of passionate listening and a shared love of Coltrane, Krautrock and the many and varied eccentricities of English Psychedelia, 'From Above' is a record with many antecedents but precious few contemporaries.
Emerging from the landscape of Iker Spozio's other-worldly cover painting (itself an echo of the Nubian utopia created by Mati Klarwein for Miles Davis) through to the final idiot funk spasms of 'Scatter', the Lunar Dunes’ debut album is that very same pagan yawp – seventy five minutes of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies that would have Bugs and Tweety cranking up their JBL 100s at the drop of an ACME anvil.
Lunar Dunes clearly know their 'Live Evil' from their 'Wolf City' but this record offers no hiding place for the oldies fetishist. Recorded in three days, edited and mixed in four, the Lunar Dunes come out sounding at once wholly modern and thoroughly European. Shifting from cacophonies of noise and horror to elongated drifting cadences where time becomes space, here is living proof that the making of truly psychedelic music requires less the ingestion of hallucinogens and more by way of imagination, a love of the form and a disregard for the rulebook.
With three hours of music on tape the selection process that produced this double album was pretty straight forward – anything that sounded too much like something they had heard too often before went straight on the cutting room floor. In the words of John Sinclair, a man with more than a passing acquaintance with rock and roll as chaos theory, they will either "make you feel it or leave the room".
It is wholly fitting that what is, at times, a confusingly contradictory record should be created by three people whose shared personal histories go back thirty years, but who had barely spent thirty hours playing together before making their debut album.
If you can detect some Faust here, a little of 'The Who Live At Leeds' there and the simultaneous holographic presence of Elvin Jones, Tina Weymouth, Hariprasad Chaurasia and even Mick Bolton's UFO then you too are riding down Titan's magic mountains with Saturn's rings visible just out the corner of your eye.
'From Above' - Space Rock without the simulator and available right now from a kosmische kiosk near you.
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Statistics:
- 72,943plays
- 5,118listners
- 27top track count
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