ninehertz

Dead Otter are back! It’s been seven years since their last album, the excellent Bridge of Weird, but then they’ve always felt transitory, a band that exists only when the stars align, a meteor returning into sight after a long trip around the sun. That when they do the likes of The Cosmic Dead’s Omar Aborida (on guitars), Monster Magnet’s John McBain (mastering), Luke Oram (incredible artwork) and Riot Season Records all get involved tells you of their abiding draw.

All with good reason. The six tracks of The Sentinel describe a band that have nestled only further into the space rock deep psych grooves, tight and together as any band on a more routine output schedule. The eleven minutes of Space Shadows feels as if on another plain, light touch deep psychedelia that has a transcendental aura surrounding it, music reaching us through some cosmic warp. At times it has a nice, smiling 60s-psych turn, before heading back into its rich meditative state. It picks up pace into classic rock territory a couple of minutes before it retires back.

This is music to have on with eyes closed, lights down, burn a candle if that’s your thing – and let it transport you – I was in none of those situations listening and still felt slightly different – changed – with this on the first time around, locked into its beauty. There’s playful guitar joisting on the jam-feel Ezquerra, although the drums, oft forgotten in descriptions of psych, drive the show with their own exotic flavouring. Ibises meanwhile is a much more laid-back journey to the stars.

There are long moments of drawn-out astral cloud airiness, band members content to reside within the psych patterns psychically interlocked between them, often before, after an age, an injection of electricity towards its end fuels the Otter spaceship to greater speeds. It ends with a cover of the excellent Hawkwind track Assault & Battery, most apt.

Let’s hope we don’t have to wait this long again for their next reappearance, but then maybe that’s part of their cosmic charm, and if indeed it is another trip around the galaxy before we hear from them again, then this experience shows that the astral journey only imprints itself on their music increasingly each time, and that it’ll be worth the wait.