What do you think it sounds like up there, behind the clouds, between the stars? Leisure Birds have a few answers to that question. The sci-fi garage quartet’s new album, Globe Master, soundtracks a journey only meant to be seen behind your eyelids, but that would probably look something like 2001 mashed up with the Man with No Name series and a vaudevillian circus.
Constructed as a concept album, Globe Master tells an otherworldly origin story that begins with a soupy ambience, launches into the final frontier with all the longing and toughness of a true space cowboy, and then crashes to earth, where things only get weirder. The vessel that carries our UFO, “Silver Runner,” doubles as a fitting theme for the beginning of an interstellar journey. Caught in the stars, moody and mysterious, the steadfast track travels through space-time with a scowl and a dark past looming. Launching forward, the oozing space sounds are coupled with an echoed, distant voice — a howling call to the moon, from the other side.
Like a spool of spaghetti stuffed in a shoebox, Globe Master is unidentifiable, unexpected, and strange, but all the more compelling for it. The album is twisted and weird, caught in the unknown and fractured in fun house mirrors, the perfect stereotype of space, the alien other, and something more familiar: a loner’s journey.
Don’t even get me started on the epilogue…
Leisure Birds' Globe Master is out August 28 on Moon Glyph.
