Soft Walls - No Time

No Time’s theme circles the subject, as is evident in its title, of time and its passing; a metaphysical pondering on what we should spend it doing and the eminent post-uni question of “What now?” (Maybe another degree – keep the Jager flowing). It rolls on in an eternal haze of psych warbles; vast swathes of the album’s material staying devoid of any vocals. An ebb and flow permeates throughout; tiding from troughs of minimalist drone, to the frantic hum of distortion and reverb heavy vocalisations. There is nothing new here - psych is everywhere at the moment - but the shape, construction, minimalism and breadth of vision within No Time gives something thicker to chew.

Beginning the record, “Won’t Remember My Name” swirls in a kaleidoscopic haze of guitar raga, reverb, heavy vocal sighs and a steady and sure pulse of psychedelia which remains prominent throughout the album’s ten tracks. “Never Come Back Again” nods to new wave with washed synths and instrumentation that reeks of Joy Division circa Closer (Only a handful of notes differentiating the basslines from it and the Macclesfield stalwarts’ “Isolation”). “Early In The Day” marks the first of the album’s two interludes which, along with “Slumbering”, offer pulsating electronic minimalism to add peaks and troughs to the album’s texture. The tail end of the album’s structure sees the frantic distortions of “Foot Of The Stairs”, to soft synth and vintage organ shades of the album’s close “Transient View”.

To reiterate, there is nothing essentially fresh here, but Soft Walls takes bits a pieces from all facets of psychedelia - electronic augmentations, repeating and overlapping lines of droning melody and rhythm, ragas, and mounds of reverb - to create a highly intriguing animal. Unlike many of today’s psych outfits, who merely ape the existential pulse of psychedelia and its testing of the boundaries of sound; Soft Walls has created a record that sticks to its marker without merely repeating what has gone before; he borrows, re-works and re-imagines. No tracks on the record could really be said to be ‘stand out’ but they create, on the whole, something that experiments with psych’s current face, paying homage to the ‘far out’ creators who originated it.