My Brother the Wind - Once There Was a Time When Time and Space Were One
Free Electric Sound
Improvised Psychedelic Rock
8 songs (32' 41")
Release year: 2014
Reviewed by Andy

By a coincidence, I was just reading a chapter in a pop history book about the psychedelic era of late 60s rock when I came upon Swedish improvisational collective My Brother the Wind, which definitely takes some of its inspiration from these acts. Their latest, Once There Was a Time When Time and Space Were One, contains no vocals and no standout songs -- but that's not completely true. The album is the song, and the tracks blend into each other as one drifts through them. If one isn't already stoned when listening to this one, it'll put one in the right frame of mind.

Song of Innocence, Part 1 has a familiar gentleness to it, the sound lapping around the listener like the tide of a warm ocean. The ringing, slightly overdriven guitar bends over the softly strummed chords, getting progressively sharper and smoother but always staying in a major key, and eventually devolving into wild strumming. Song of Innocence, Part 2, on the other hand, is more like a thunderstorm is about to happen over that ocean. It's still warm but it's much more throbbing and intense, with a single note being phase-shifted back and forth over the song in a hypnotic way, the drums now more insistent and pounding. Once it quiets down we get the sharper and more riff-driven Into the Cosmic Halo, still a one-note rhythm melody but with the guitar playing a bluesy, wah-wah drenched drone of a solo to the faster drumming that is on this song. This solo weaves endlessly through the song, culminating in a series of feedback squeals.

From space-rock jams we go temporarily into a more quiet and ambient territory, from the lazy folkish guitar strumming of Misty Mountainside to the drawn-out sound in Thomas Mera Gartz of the guitar, with a huge sustain that sounds like an EBow is being used. After this part, the title track seems like an afterthought, quiet but with little guitar riddles happening throughout it until the final track on the album brings in a Mellotron: a perfect instrument for a 60s-influenced psychedelic album.

Once There Was a Time When Time and Space Were One isn't metal (its ancestors branched off the family tree before Black Sabbath's first album) but that doesn't mean it isn't something a metal fan would like -- if he happens to be in a quiet, pleasant mood and needs a break from the mosh pit, that is. As a single piece of music, it's not particularly hard and pointed, but it has a certain restrained heaviness to it all the same.

Killing Songs :
None
Andy quoted 78 / 100
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