While it may take a few minutes into “Now Cover Your Body with Black Light,” the opening track on this Swedish trio’s debut to finally dawn on you that you’ve been listening to the melody from “A Time for Us” (i.e., “Theme from ‘Romeo & Juliet’”), you’ll quickly regain your footing by the time the full accompaniment of sitars, guitars, etc. wrestle that melody into a heady, psychedelic maelstrom that gently falls to earth ten minutes later like a silent shroud of snow blanketing a mid-winter’s barren landscape. (The duo trading as the Loving Eye hail from one of Sweden’s northernmost provinces, Västerbotten, making them neighbors of our old friends, Spacious Mind, in whose studio this was recorded and on whose label it was released. They, therefore, know a thing or three about the affect cold, barren landscapes have upon one’s psyche!)
The buzzing, electronic shock treatment that is “I Dauflom” – complete with rewinding tapes, Kjetil’s disembodied (Swedish) vocals, distorted sitars and crow-cawing synths – sounds like White Noise got lost inside the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. At once intriguing, baffling and frustrating, its closest relative may be Roger Waters gathered together in a cave with several species of small animals grooving with a pict or the deranged dementia from that baffling commune of fellow Scandinavian wyrdfolks in Kamielliset Ystevet and the Origami Republika.
The unwieldy-titled “They Use To Be Like Children, Carefree…Always Happy And Laughing” finds us back on more traditional terra firma with a hulking leviathan of a mind melter, complete with flittering guitars, marching drumbeats, and tinkling synths emulating Pied Piper flutes morphing into ominous, distorted sound effects and xylophones which gently wrap us under a comforting blanket of music boxes playing night time lullabies. “Dal-Jani Välta” combines massive, teeth-rattling, shrieking guitar with stony, deep woods ramblings like Pink Floyd with a hot poker stuck up their ass.
The remaining two tracks are not exactly “songs” in the traditional sense, but moods or musical visions for inner explorations and are best experienced lying prostrate on a plush carpet in a dark room with closed eyes. You are highly encouraged to follow the advice of one of these latter tracks, “Let’s Build A Small Vessle And Land Inside Her Heart” and embark on this spiritual, musical journey under the guidance of Råd Kjetil and her Loving (third) Eye of God, as new meanings will reveal themselves upon each subsequent listen. (Jeff Penczak)

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