THEY BLIND THE STARS, AND THE WILD TEAM 2009

**** DAILY TELEGRAPH - ALBUM OF THE WEEK

Let's hear it for ambition. Let's hear it for double albums and instrumental bands who paint pictures in the listener's mind. Let's hear it for albums you can play on your headphones, lights out, and go for a trip.
The first disc features the traditional rock-band line-up: shorter songs, with an orchestral sweep to its sound. The second goes beyond that, and for fans of the instrumental works of explorers such as Brian Eno and Tangerine Dream, it might be better than the first.
It has been four years since Fractions, and they have found a like mind in American producer Scott Colburn, who worked with Animal Collective and Arcade Fire.
The album opens with the cheery mid-tempo groove of Beat The Twilight and builds to a towering wall of sound on the title track. They hover through ghostly visitations such as Happy Place and visit both end of the sonic spectrum on the wide screen Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom.
The second album sheds the rock band format to explore harmonic synthesiser atmospheres. It is a beautiful place to go to escape.
Besides, you have to love a band who call a track Charlotte Rampling.

Noel Mengel

***** THE BRAG - ALBUM OF THE WEEK

There is a flowing grace to Decoder Ring's new instrumental double album, right down to allowing the songs to bleed into one another, giving the record an almost symphonic feel. Disc one track one is Beat The Twilight, a perfect introduction with its blend of atmospheric synths and graceful guitar rock. the title track swells and emotes like a Godfrey Reggio film on an Imax screen. Charlotte rampling ought to be delighted with the sweeping, panoramic track named in her honour - and may well ask why ex-husband Jean Michel Jarre never came up with such a lovely instrumental tribute. Still beautiful, there is also an almost My Bloody Valentine queasiness to the epic 100 Suns. Thats just some of the highlights of disc one.
Disc two takes an ethereal deviation from the more band-oriented first CD, relying on sonic texture instead of rhythm or melody. Same Old Paradise is over 11 minutes of beatless electronics, droning and dive-bombing like the alien choir emanating from the monolith in 2001 - it's ambient music with a delicious, otherworldly sense of unease. The Horse And The Hand Grenade is rendered even more spectral, with a chilly wind-like pulse providing a ghostly, wordless mantra, before ending in a monolithic wall of sound. The 14-minute All The Streams Have Little Glitches In Them is gentler, the electronic sketches reaching womb-like tranquility. Final track The Inland Sea has an especially evocative title, particularly coming from an Australian group - the lonely airiness of the piece evokes the imagines central Australian body of water that motivated inland exploration in 1820s and 1830s.

Matt Thrower