Haunted By Hallucinations

Finland’s Haunted by Hallucinations create brooding, textural works that find a home between post-rock’s meandering and goth-pop’s moping. It’s a nice place to reside, the music seeming so very much like soundtrack work – a few moments (as on the title track) that feel like they have been lifted from either a horror film score or even the parody version. On the opening track, Krystal, it’s a spacey, synth-driven world where those eerie sounds are placed inside the framework of a loping bass-line and drums, for Winter it’s to guitar-driven shapes – almost like King Loser’s surf-rock extrapolations if played by The Album Leaf.

Confused Mind adds vocals – and we start to move towards the psychedelic-meets-stoner sound of Dead Skeletons, but then with Haunting we’re back to instrumental Flying Nun-like noodling.

A slight shimmer of a sixties feel enters (You Can’t See, Midnight Manor) where you detect the influence of – at least – The Velvet Underground.

And then the closing Confessions is the masterpiece of the album – the big serve of horror movie music – drones and drifting and weird wobbles that shimmer in and around the body of the tune.

It’s as easy listening as uneasy-listening music can get. I like it a lot.