After a set of singles that preceded it, Michael Donoghue's second album is finally out. Fractals contains eight tracks and ends up incorporating the sound that Donoghue has been releasing in the last months of his short but intense career.
Words by Marco Guerra
Discovered via http://musosoup.com
So let's go straight into the album audition. “Black Tide” kicks off with a tense atmosphere, a futuristic and expectant tone. It is a dark, mysterious beginning that leaves us in suspense about what will follow.
I already knew the second track “Mantis” and it's so good to hear it again and again. It has the right dose of experimentalism, mixed with ethereal pads and with that bell sound, making it a song that puts us somewhere between a tender dream and a black box with intense strobe lights.
“Apolemia” is the perfect example of beginning, middle and end in music. The intro of the song is simply brilliant, then everything else is impeccably rich. It's amazing how this track can be so narrative, like a staged tale.
“Vertigo” introduces us to the voice of the guest Koffie, who is joined by a slow kick, apocalyptic synthesisers and a lonely piano.
“Last Thursdayism” resumes the tension, this time with an infectious groove and, again, a brilliant balance between the physicality of the 4 X 4 rhythm and the calm of beatless ambient music.
“Inner Space” is total relaxation. Not that yoga-type relax, but the one where we just took a night run hand in hand with our lover and then we lay on our backs looking at the star sky with a wide smile on our face. Happiness, hope, joy.
“Fractals” is without a doubt the touchstone of the album, bringing together everything I've been saying here from all the times I've written about Donoghue's music. An enormous ability to jump around from genre to genre, a unique sensitivity about knowing exactly how and when the different layers must come in and out, when and how they will cross each other. Deep down, it is all about wisdom in musical composition.
To close, “Magnolia Dusk” is that kind of track with an enormous power of image suggestion, the perfect soundtrack of a space-age movie.
MIchael Donoghue has been making a musical path full of consistency, of enormous delivery and musical coherence. And what a pleasure it has given me to witness it!