Roy Montgomery - Audiotherapy (2022)

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Roy Montgomery - Audiotherapy (2022)

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More introspective shimmer from Kiwi pioneer Roy Montgomery, the fourth and final album in a series of celebratory releases to memorialize 40 years of work. Montgomery's usual weightless dream pop haze is here smudged to cosmic dust - think Cocteau Twins, Slowdive, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma.

The cover of 'Audiotherapy' is as close to realism as we've seen from Montgomery's Grapefuit selection. Unlike its predecessors, this one features a discernible landscape, smeared into textures, shapes, and lines of color. The music follows a similar path; it's the most experimental record of the series, using familiar sounds and structures and torching them into the sublime.

Montgomery opens the album with a short fake-out, three-and-a-half minute pop song 'Audioramble' that lulls us into a false sense of normality before the epic 'Occusione' makes its grand entrance. This is Montgomery at his most explosive, snowballing from reverberating strums and Maria Eleanora C Mollard's ASMR poetry, to ear-splitting sheet noise, feedback and overdrive in the final third.

'Audiomemory' meanwhile is a wiry callback to "Island of Lost Souls" standout 'The expedition across your skin' with its evocative krautrock-informed beatbox thump and electrified guitar clouds. But it's 'Audiotransport' that has us hot under the collar - all blown-out paradise chords and cathedral drums, it sounds like a DIY tribute to Cocteau Twins' "Head Over Heels" era, stretching out the levitational melancholy into a long-form drone meditation. So good, really.