Review: Sketches For Albinos - Fireworks And The Dead City Radio

Fireworks And The Dead City Radio is daydreaming to me. Not only for the partially formed thoughts that bend in their vaguely recalled shape, but for the narrative movement that sees gateways into new thoughts within the molecular details of others; the manner and warmth of resonant guitar decay brings to mind a particular place and then a particular dialogue, with memories constantly unfolding from within an unfolding. The album is a collage of loose communication; ideas tethered by points of connection only a hair in width, with muffled speech and starlit chimes rising out of the melody clouds that carry the music outward, upward.

There is a juvenile quality to the guitar rhythms here; an awkward, heavy jangle of a first-time player, still calibrating their limbs to the alien gesture of the alternate strum; childlike, eager, ambitious; injecting the atmosphere with playful synaptic movement and a sort of idle, blissful naivety. I doze into this rhythm, whose slackened motion brings about an infectious sort of lethargy, leaving me sedated and welcome to the coming and going of misremembered telephone conversations, limping electronic beats and cathedral reverb swathes. I feel like I’m hearing a shoegaze record during an afternoon nap – aqueous rock seeps in and out as I chicane the spectrum of consciousness, feeding the warped melodies of broken strings into a muddled catalogue of memory and imagination.