RETURN TO SKY

I've been following this band for a few years (since their Summer Sessions), and each subsequent release gets better and better. Causa Sui's music is a jammy kind of space-rock that owes equal debt to Grateful Dead's Dark Star and Pink Floyd's Echoes. Songs on the aforementioned Summer Sessions recording were unafraid to stretch out to 20 minutes or more. Here, on Return to Sky, the main thing that strikes the listener is how condensed the music has become. The entire album is a mere forty-five minutes which fits very comfortably on a single LP. It consists of 5 tracks each averaging about 9 minutes. This pattern of slimming down is carried on throughout the tunes themselves, as each song is a tightly constructed journey. However, the path is far from linear as each song travels through a number of different soundscapes from Hawkwindish hard riffing to jazz-inflected float-y soundscapes reminiscent of Jimi Hendrix's spaced out passages on 1983/Moon Turn the Tides. All of which Causa Sui had previously demonstrated their capability at doing on previous releases. On Return to Sky, however, all of the band's qualities get distilled into a powerful offering with little in the way of fat. I'd highly recommend this release for fans of Spacerock.