Lycia — Tripping Back Into The Broken Days
The comeback album Tripping Back Into The Broken Days was recently released, in complete secrecy. And oh, am I glad that Tara held her tongue back then! Is reality, this was the new release of the acoustic Lycia side project Estraya, which Tara had in fact told me about, but it was somehow released under the Lycia moniker.
For those of thee who may not yet be familiar with Lycia's otherworldly music, I could best describe it as ethereal/darkwave music that took The Cure's sound into a more ambient and drifting state. Those were in the old days, however. As the years progressed, the few distorted guitars already there were used to a much lesser degree, and this new album utilizes only three instruments: non-distorted guitars, synths and singing. The songs tend to focus on a central guitar piece and then throw in variation through the pulsating synthetics and the soothing vocals. Mike and Tara take turns on vocal duties on this very personal album, which lyrically and musically describes a lot of hardships the couple has been through in the last few years - I will not delve further into these issues, as I believe such nosing around in other people's businesses belong in tabloid papers and not music reviews, but just say that it is a brave step and conveyed very well by the couple on this album.
Tripping Back Into The Broken Days is a good album, no doubt about it. However, I am of course obliged to compare it to the rest of their back catalogue, and here, the album falls short. While the sound is clearer than ever and there are enormous amounts of atmosphere in the music as always, the guitar pieces often have a tendency to become very monotonous and boring, which can turn out to be a real drag as the guitars are put in such a centralized position that the vocals and synths cannot draw the focus from the repetition, no matter how varied they may be. Also, a lot of the songs seem to be based on almost the same guitar pieces, which again draws us to the beforementioned problem. There are several really very good songs on the album though, for instance Asleep In The River, Gray December Desert Day, Halfway Between Here And There and Pale Blue Prevails. And even though this album does not match the previous masterpieces, it must still be mentioned that there is hardly any competition in this genre - Lycia have been unsurpassed for years when it comes to making beautiful, ethereal darkwave, and this album is still miles better than most of the rivals' efforts. I truly hope that Tara and Mike will release another album more - they may not need to prove anything, but the world still needs them all the more.