The Observatory - August Is The Cruellest (2016)

The Observatory fuses progressive sounds with unconventional structures, bold arrangements, improvisation, thought and expression, while borrowing from random music styles to stir up a potent concoction of emotionally powerful extremes, disturbed and angry on one end, haunting and melancholic on the other.
The band was influenced by Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt, This Heat, Tortoise, Talk Talk, Shining, Jaga Jazzist, Supersilent, Brian Wilson, Nick Drake and others.
Recorded both in Singapore and Norway, 'August is the cruellest', is a work of political noise, a punishing challenge to look inward and move forward.
Musically, it is an abstraction of the blues in the mode of C, influenced by the power of the riff and the energy of heavy rock music. Expanding upon Oscilla, the song, which is also in the key of C and diving deeper into its modal abyss.
Lyrically drawing bleak comparisons from the poems of T.S. Eliot and Yan Jun; outlining the harshness of the air we breathe from our swiddening neighbours and constructing a landscape of the inevitable based on the choices that we and our forefathers have made. The music jolts and scares through feedback and incessant pulse in the hopes of toppling the apathetic stance that we, for generations, have come to find comfortable and convenient.
Barely brimming over with rage, this album chafes at the bit of inertia and strains against the monolith of apathy. The songs limber, lumber and twist in turn, clamouring and beguiling – till the cloudburst pierces the grey skies. Leslie Low’s voice is the rare stream of calm in this turmoil, calling upon all to create a better world upon the ashes of what came before, to undertake a radical journey of honesty and maturity. After all, death and decay is opportunity for renewal, for a reckoning withal, there can be no other path.