ALIEN LIZARD – Lucid Dream Machine (2022, Digital/Bandcamp Self-Released)

RELEASE INFO:

Label: Self-Released

Format: Digital/Bandcamp

Release Date: 22 Feb 2022

Alien Lizard is another wonderful Polish “discovery” (for me of course, and hopefully for you too)… Alien Lizard are coming from Gdańsk, Poland. The band consists of two brothers and according to their Bandcamp page, they have 3 digital album releases with “Lucid Dream Machine” being the 4^th. All music over here is written by the 2 brothers while the lyrics contain excerpts from the works of Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Rosalía de Castro, Philip K. Dick, Léon Dierx, Adam Mickiewicz, Edgar Allan Poe, & Kurt Vonnegut… Quite impressive I must admit… “Lucid Dream Machine” consists of 9 tracks. The opener “Terminal” starts under a Neo-Krauty steady industrialized beat creating a monotonous hazy cold environment, Neu! blends with Spacemen 3 under a huge Sisters Of Mercy lense… On “Lotus Eaters” there’s a rapid change of the scenery, everything turned out to be hallucinogenically colorful, whispering vocals under a lysergic trippy (n’ creepy) kind of sacramental soundscape while huge amounts of LSD are filling the air, this is mystical mind-blowing Psychedelia (and my Personal Highlight of the album)! The mystery continues on “Obserwacja Obserwatora”, the track dives into Kalacakra’s magical early days, you’ll certainly find comparisons with “Naerby Shiras”, a magnificent tune that the only negative thing about it is that it is only 2:30min… “Los Naranjos” which translates to “The Orange Trees” with its beautiful Spanish female vocals, it’s quite trippy and psychedelic though it’s becoming really strange towards its end. “Sympathy For The Luddite” dives deeper into a dark Psychedelic stratosphere, it has English whispering vocals and an intense Post-Rock-something atmosphere… “Eyes Eye The I’s In You” (what a title!) is a short slow eerie trip-a-delic experimental tune, somehow lost in an isolated Psych industrial zone… “The Bird” it’s another slow number, the environment here is lysergic and trippy, a mysterious track with an amazing acoustic guitar-effected sounding, it dives deeper into melancholy and strangeness, becoming extremely psych-o-industrialized towards its end… “Romantycznosc” has female-spoken lyrics (in Polish I may guess) and at least to my ears, this one sounds like someone is reading an excerpt from a poem or something, accompanied by trippy psych music… The music stops, and the reciting continues while the background has by now become even more psychedelically eerie, this is a lovely weird tune… Eventually, the album closes with a track taken its title by a burrowing plant-eating Australian marsupial which resembles a small bear with short legs, “Wombat 9” has a very different environment than the previous tracks, the scenery has totally changed, and the soundscape has become a Psych-Ambient one, quite dreamy, a kind of a strange sad song… In conclusion, I really liked “Lucid Dream Machine”, I will definitely go and listen to the band’s previous efforts and I have already started following them… I advise you to do the same… TimeLord Michalis   

Tracklist

Listen / Buy through ALIEN LIZARD Bandcamp