Lucid Express
Instant Comfort
Kanine Records
Moments of clarity prove elusive on the rapturous Instant Comfort, what with all the dizzying dream-pop head trips and dense layers of woozy shoegazing bluster unleashed by Lucid Express. Surrounded by shimmering, ethereal beauty and subject to sensory overload, it’s hard to think straight. Overwhelming pessimism and disappointment can have the same effect.
Hong Kong has left Lucid Express heartbroken. It’s a place they don’t recognize anymore. The free expression and colorful diversity they once enjoyed has been replaced by cold repression and fear, complicating singer/synth whiz Kim Ho’s relationship with the hometown she once loved unconditionally. Retreating to nearby mountains to make sense of Hong Kong’s unsettling transformation, and to gain a truer sense of self, Ho eventually reconvened with the rest of Lucid Express to record their stunning sophomore album in a cocoon of industrial space on the outskirts of the city. Throwing caution to the wind, they let their imaginations soar.
Under the immersive influence of myriad effects, an expansive and always swerving Instant Comfort – breathtaking in its audacity and surreal iridescence – seems to glide from track to track. And yet for all the sonic wonderment and intricacy produced by Lucid Express, airy melodies – pure as the driven snow – meet little resistance in plowing through noisy squalls and atmospheric sprawl, floating across the driving, feedback-tortured “Setback” and an icy “Aster,” which explores a more celestial, voluminous universe.
Sending vaporous, weightless vocals headlong into seas of textured, heavy guitar turbulence that can turn softly expressive on a whim as it rhythmically shifts gears easily, Instant Comfort is visited by the ghosts of shoegazers past, present, and future. Where the title track nests in a cloudy, echoing boil and building plume of My Bloody Valentine distortion, a watery “Promise Me” is carried by a massive, widening flood of Slowdive swoon and the sugary “Faux Sweetness” bends and taps into the noise-pop, electro-rock darkness of Curve and drifts over an acoustic interlude, but “Take Heart” is simply and unabashedly sweet like Wishy, if also affectingly wistful. All of which speaks to the hopeful resilience of Lucid Express against cruel, artless indifference, any lingering tension or confusion washed away as each immersive headphone masterpiece releases a deluge of melodic, converging sounds that pours over any suspension bridge of disbelief connecting the Cocteau Twins to the Deftones.
Reality fades, however, as Lucid Express enters the slow swirl and weighty, crushing bombast of “Dark Glass,” setting off on a trippy, mind-bending adventure into the void that feels like a spacey escape. Instant Comfort is gonna get you and knock you right back into REM sleep.
