Album Review

Delta Sleep – Twin Galaxies

• 15th Jun 2015

Delta Sleep‘s debut album Twin Galaxies exuberantly springboards the listener straight into the midst of a complex musical journey – through twists and turns with guitar riffs coming thick, fast and hard to grasp – before the songs fall away into other arrangements altogether; frankly, it’s intriguing madness. Like an experiment that’s lived up almost perfectly to the band’s expectations, whatever their opinion of the flaws of the album may be, if any, to the listener it’s just added a tonne more personality.

The band have hit a standard of music here that will be hard for them to beat in the future – refreshing lyrics and melodies that completely stun and shock. The keyboard introduction of ‘Assemble, Activate’ is the calm before the storm, the octopus creeping up onto the unaware ship on the water’s surface; then explodes an ecstasy of guitar on the ‘Uncle lvan’ as the storm hits with an unnatural force, or the octopus grabs the ship and shakes it furiously in its monstrous tentacles. It leaves a feeling of complete panic and anxiety, where something overwhelmingly strong is taking over and one is left hopeless of any saviour. In places, it’s a horrifying visionary tale to the ears.

The album does have variety. ‘Letters’ starts us off blissfully, a nice melody, calm drums, but then a murderous, jumpy imp on cocaine stabs us in the back as the song erupts into a full on rampage. It’s a jagged track that runs the gamut of opposing emotions in the space of five minutes. The lyrics in the tracks sometimes conjure up sad reflection and reminiscing as with ‘Lake Sprinkle Sprankle’, which starts on an eruption of drums before the vocals go off in an emotion filled rant “Oh my eyes don’t recognise those eyes in that dress you wore, those eyes stuck in my mind” – they go perfectly with the fast paced melody of the song. Elsewhere, the ‘Spy Turtles’ lyrics are ones that allow a lot of thinking over the metaphorical meaning “awake to find the water rushing in through cracks in the ceiling grab your oxygen behind and leave everything behind”. They are the lyrics of a drowning man, leaving one grasping at their own emotional memories left behind in order to relate, desperately gulping for air in a musical sea of fear and loathing.

Twin Galaxies is a brilliant album containing all sorts of entertainment and some truly thought provoking lyrics. It never fails to surprise from track to track and is not just superficially themed with pseudo-intellectual subtext, but rather comes together as a whole rollercoaster of an emotion.

– Sasha Hodes

Venue: Twin Galaxies
Support Band: Big Scary Monsters Records