Hopewell: Curved Glass

"Good gravy," I realized by the 10th and final track, "He was right!" What my friend's twisted psyche had come to grips with just before it overloaded and shorted out was the truth about Hopewell: this is Pink Floyd, 1968. This is Mercury Rev before it decided it was the second coming of The Band. This is Wayne Coyne, mind-snapped, writing for Spiritualized. Hopewell, a New York four-piece, has created the last great psychedelic album of the century.

The electronic squiggles and feedback that open the disc are obliterated by the savage roar of "The Angel Is My Watermark," whose tribal drums leap out of the speakers like some stomping echo from A Saucerful Of Secrets. There is more sound in this one song than on the entirety of most records. Dissonant guitars, strange keyboards, and surreal vocals swirl everywhere, throttling your eardrums, kicking at synapses, curbstomping your brain's sound processors.

The rest of the elements fall into place as the album progresses, coating your brain with a heavy psychedelic shellac. The warped space-country of "Christmas Now," the slithery backward guitars of "There is Something," the jarring effects on "In The Small Places," and the reverb slathered generously over everything make this the densest headphone disc since The Flaming Lips' The Soft Bulletin.

With such a capability for creating thick layers of sound, it would be easy for Hopewell to fall into that class of "noise for the sake of noise" wankers. Nevertheless, on The Curved Glass, every strange rhythmic pattern and every buried keyboard note adds up to a dense, loud, yet beautifully melodic whole.

This record's release was delayed many times for circumstances that are almost as beyond control as the music contained therein, but now that The Curved Glass is finally with us, there's nothing left to do but sit back, put the headphones on, and let the mind melt to the best psychedelic album to come along in years. (Priatus)

—Jim Laakso

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