Multi-layered and cosmic, 'Earth-Sized Worlds' is an album you will find yourself playing back over and over again.
Photo: Marieke Hulzinga | Words: Otis Hayes
Mandrake Handshake explore the vast musical cosmos on their eclectic debut long player, 'Earth-Sized Worlds'. Out via Tip Top Recordings the nine-track album is full of twists and turns, a patchwork of genres from psychedelia to electronic to samba. Unconventional instruments find their place comfortably amongst the group's mesmerising rhythms as the London-via-Oxford collective emit some of the most transportive psychedelic music out there today.
'Earth-Sized Worlds' follows Mandrake Handshake's first two EPs, 'Shake The Hand That Feeds You' (2021) and 'The Triple Point Of Water' (2022). With this debut album finally concluding its long voyage from some deep corner of space to arrive on Earth, the band declared: "We, Mandrake Handshake are all set to arrive at our first destination: Space Beach. A land of dichotomies, where the sea joins the sky and trees reach up and tickle the bellies of stars, Space Beach is a marriage of the organic and mechanical, the intimate and the epic, and offers a heady draught from which you may gladly sup. Here, when peering into this horizon, blooms of planets and comets, asteroids and moons reveal themselves, and inside them, countless tales: victory and defeat, love and hate, future and past, all wrapped up in each of these Earth-Sized Worlds. So come, join us, and stay a while".
Opening track, 'Time Goes Up', introduces 'Earth-Sized Worlds' with a flurry of horns, before straying into jangly guitars, spacey synths and vocals which oscillate like drifting cosmic dust. The abundance of sounds and styles spanned by 'Earth-Sized Worlds' is simply stunning, whether it be the deep bass lines on the lo-fi 'Charlie's Comet', the shuffling drums on the indie/alternative 'Lorenzo's Desk' or the the Arabic guitar scales sprinkled across 'Barranmode'. With so much detail to it, you could listen to 'Earth-Sized Worlds' over and over and still feel like you have only scratched the surface. Each repeat continues to offer new discoveries.
Almost every track on the album leads onto the next without pause, with synths, flutes and horns smoothing these transitions. These thread the album together, as if a strand of DNA runs directly through its core, thus complimenting its thematic exploration of the interrelation of space and time. At a little over nine minutes long, the album's closer and title-track, 'Earth-Sized Worlds', brings a soft and gentle ease. Droning synths, melodic bass and hypnotic vocals all cascade amongst a wash of percussive instruments as they slowly lead to an explosion of sound which rises towards the skies before lightly fading out, leaving you to flip the record back to side one to start the trip over again.
Produced by Don Kirtley, Mandrake Handshake spent nine long days intensively laying down 'Earth-Sized Worlds'. Recording at a rooftop studio in Woolwich, the process saw a plethora of instruments brought in and out of the studio by as many band members, whose ideas fuse here in a transcendent melange. Between the group's many members, Mandrake Handshake benefit from lots of personalities, influences, concepts and cultures, some shared and some unique. Possessing the keen ability to balance between those influences and personalities is the key, and on 'Earth-Sized Worlds' it is clear Mandrake Handshake are masters of whittling their ideas down into a fine match, which lights an explosion of tightly woven compositions blossoming with colour, character and complexity.
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