Mountain High 2 – CandyFlip

The first Mountain High turned into a bit of a soundtrack for yours truly; travelling in pre-Ipod days, whatever I had on CD became ingrained into my brain like an aged doofer’s a priori sense of jadedness. And this album, while it has a slightly different take, looks like it has the same potential. Cell’s The Gate is the perfect opener, a gorgeously warm piece that is for me way above any of the material on his album. It sets the scene perfectly, with perfectly-balanced sounds evocative somehow of late-night incense-burning and long, rambling conversation about the nature of the universe. Max Maxwell & TKY’s Way Of Life was featured on the rather delightful Unwind CD on Compact a couple of weeks back; it sounds just as good here, but I can’t help but think that its busy euphoria escalates the flow of the album a little too quickly. Kick Bong’s Way Of Life is a deliciously psychedelic bit of downtempo, that seems to conjure up multiple emotions and splice them left and right with drug-addled goodness. The highest points on Mountain High 2 come from Lideres Band, a live project from Brazil whose three tracks form a sort of backbone to this album and whose music is very, very special indeed. Their stuff is organic, it’s uplifting, and it’s got that certain special “something” that reviewing psychedelic music is all about: that little spark of magic. Very, very good stuff indeed, I’d recommend the album for these three and these three alone. Seriously folks, this is some of the best chillout I’ve heard since I first heard the likes of Entheogenic and (I refuse the temptation to use “S” word). Their material (particularly Duende) is psychedelic in the old sense of the word, properly evocative and transporting music that genuinely unfolds into new areas at every step along the way. Kick Bong does well again with Ballad, firmly keeping his name at the top of the list of 2005’s interesting artists. There’s a very deep musicality that’s starting to come out from this guy, and I’m looking forward to see where he goes with is. I.X.O.P’s Forever is a great piece of mellowed-out dub that soars out into the stratosphere, before Aes Dana and Solar Fields close the album with two tracks that are very much what you’d expect from each artist, but great examples thereof. In short, this is bloody class: the Lideres Band material is, like I said before, reason enough to buy this entire album. The flow may not be as tightly perfect as the first Mountain High album, but in a market that’s getting more and more crowded all the time it’s reassuring to see so much different, high quality music on one CD.