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Rating:
Sav X's graffiti color the fifth work of English singer/guitarist Gary Ramon and his two companions. Nine tracks played in 50 sweet/bitter/visionary minutes, suspended between electro-acoustic lightness or possessed by breathtaking rhythms. As is characteristic of the Sun Dial brand, here you find as much sixties psychedelia as you want. Not coincidentally, "Red Sky" opens with the sweet guitar arpeggio stolen from "Wind Cries Mary" by Seattle's left-hander and immediately brings the listener into collision with a swarm of westcoastian floydescent soap bubbles bursting against a freak-beat mirror. Gary's particular aptitude for melodic research acts as a counterbalance for the songs on this album, so "3000 miles" combines sweet vocal arrangements with acoustic atmospheres enhanced by synth effects while revealing powerful heavy tensions in the eccentric developments of "Apollo", "Are you Supernatural?" or "Bad Drug", which are robust sonic walls with a Stooges-like metallic vein.
The harmonic side of Sun Dial is unveiled by the hallucinogenic candy unwrapped from the plots of "Fly into the sun" and especially from "Nova", unexpectedly enhanced by a glorious mellotron. Gary's guitar effortlessly shifts from acoustic tones to ultra-electric ones affected by fuzz-wah-feedback. And if the final "Yantra Yam" were repeated infinitely, we would slowly melt into this slow and corrosive electric instrumental impregnated with toxic wahwah while a flute, emerging from who knows which meander of the mind, leads us enchanted like the rats of Hamelin to the cathedral of psychedelic worship for the body and soul.
When, by now short of cosmic energy, Sun Dial was at the end of their iridescent journey that began with "Other Way Out", Gary Ramon in 1995 still manages to show us its authentic soul trapped in some album from nearly thirty years before.
"Stop the world," Gary seems to say "... I want to get off."
Tracklist
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