CELESTIAL OCEAN

Brainticket have almost completely abandoned the rock orientation that they presented in songs such as "Waching You", "Places of Light", "Black Sand", "Like a Place in the Sun" and "Coco Mary", with the single exception being the track "Egyptian Kings". Their sound on this album is less striking, less groovy and less immediate and more more spacey and trance-inducing, more electronic and more acoustically eclectic. Beginning with the song "Egyptian Kings", the album seems to embark on a journey, or trip ;) that it never comes back from. In the rest of the album, we are drawn in to a sonic world filled with minimalist weird psychedelic We have 3 flowing acoustic and meditative tracks with acoustic guitar and either zither, sounding a lot like harp ("Jardins" and "Cosmic Winds") or sitar ("Rainbow"), 3 trippy electronic grooves with percussion (toms, timbales and occasional wood blocks) ("Era of Technology", "To Another Universe", and "The Space Between"). Then we have "Egyptian Kings", which is a multilayered electronic rock groove with drums and echoing flute and vocals, and finally "Visions", which is a beautiful and well played (as always with the virtuoso Joel Vandroogenbroeck) piano solo piece that goes into a Latin-sounding groove with woodblock in 5/8, followed by a reprise of the melody from "To Another Universe" with keyboard soloing over it and with it at the end and finally some of the lyrics from "Egyptian Kings". The keyboards and other instruments and electronics/sound-effects appearing on the majority of this album are very experimental and creative in creating musical textures. Like their last album "'Psychonaut'", "Celestial Ocean" contains some short songs at the end of tracks, as well as a few trippy interludes, albeit to a slightly lesser extent. Whereas 'Psychonaut' contained about 17 distinct sound segments (not counting verse and chorus parts or solos over the music) ranging from 15 seconds to 6 minutes over a total of 32 minutes, ''Celestian Ocean'' has about 15 over a total of 37 minutesThis album benefits from being 5 minutes longer than its predecessor (which was good enough to forgive its mediocre 32 minutes but could have definitely used a couple more songs) and three than their first (which desperately needed a couple more short songs to balance the first two short songs with the 26-minute "Brainticket"). This is an album I can get lost into and really should be experienced as a whole, as the whole is greatly superior to the sum of its parts.

This album took me longer to get into than Psychonaut or Cottonwoodhill but has grown on me a great deal since then and i hold it below their masterpiece Psychonaut and slightly above Cottonwoodhill.

Recommended to those liking krautrock, psychedelic, electronic, and ethnic acoustic musical textures and/or bands such as Dom, Brave New World, Agitation Free, Popol Vuh, Kalacakra, Dzyan, Popol Vuh, Amon Düül II, Can, Ashra, Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream, Yatha Sidhra and Bröselmaschine.

4.5 stars!