ninehertz

Southend’s ADCX – A Day Called X – return after eight years of wilderness following a debut album of much promise. Hopefully this will reinvigorate the hope that spun out of tracks like Project 242 on that superb first offering, and we see them become a mainstay of the scene.

Blue Ruin is an EP of four tracks and 24 minutes, co-released with a short story entitled The Sun Came UP at 06:31, a reading experience designed to be soundtracked by ADCX’s music. It is a wonderfully creative and creepy sci-fi tale that I’d happily read more of.

Listening to the EP, ADCX have lost none of the magic which so entranced us before. Chariots opens with some static gristled noise, before it quickly settles down into the beauty and peacefulness of space rock, capturing the cosmic vastness in a Vangelis manner. It evolves into grand post-rock architecture with more than a nod to Deftones’ Be Quiet and Drive if performed in a slight stoner rock style. It is a comforting sound and an excellent beginning.

The title track that follows is chilled, sample driven space rock once more. The stoner riff that arrives with some urgency, impetus and passion is similar to that at the end of Kyuss’ El Rodeo. The Sifting Bridge provides some variance, with an abrupt turn, almost 80s synth pop for reasons I can’t explain – it’s not bad just completely unexpected. There is something of weight in the guitars in occasional surges and its inevitable bulkier finale. It, like the release as a whole now I think of it, could be brothers with Haast, another UK doom underground band, in its prog-may-care approach.

It closes with Craters, low and quiet with samples and synths once more, until an increasingly winding and skittish guitar disrupts that peace. The whole EP is an expert lesson in balancing light and dark of astral imaginations, up there with the best of our heavier end of space-rock, where the likes of Yuri Gagarin and Vinnum Sabbathi are docked. It is good to have them back.