Soft Hearted Scientists
Waltz Of The Weekend
After quite a long hiatus, not helped by a global pandemic and various unpleasant life events, the Scientists at last return with their biggest and most ambitious studio album yet! It's a 75 minute double album wild beast crammed on to a single CD to keep the cost down. It features 12 tracks. Four of these are compact radio friendly psychedelic pop singles with huge choruses. They are 'What Grows Inside The Garden?,' 'Rode My Bike,' 'The Fixer' and 'Vicious Vivian.' Each one is stuffed to the eyeballs with vocal and instrumental hooks that take several listens to become fully apparent. But there are also many tracks that stretch out and enter new territory. 'Waltz Of The Weekend' is a psychedelic waltz inspired by a daytrip to Tintern Abbey. It features an outrageously over the top haunted middle section that sounds like 'Bohemian Rhapsody' performed by ghost monks, with Hank Marvin playing surf guitar in another dimension. 'Sea Anemone Song' is a huge heartbroken psych ballad, channelling a lot of the awful things that have happened in the last 3 years, with an end section that gradually disintegrates on an asteroid belt. 'Gadzooks!' is the coda to 'Rode My Bike' and starts out as a psych rumble that gets progressively more insane, featuring a sly echo vocal nod to Bowie's 'The Bewlay Brothers,' crazed guitars, a string section, speaking in tongues and an ending FAR more over the top than a Bond theme. 'Who Loves The Moon?' is SHS guitarist Paul's favourite song EVER by SHS. It's a multi layered lament to lost love with a haunted, ancient, Disney/Night Of The Hunter movie feel, and SEVEN vocal tunes. Cashback! 'The Things We Make' starts as a psychedelic ballad about musical creativity itself, but with verses recounting a haunted evening in North Wales many years ago. Halfway through it falls apart after being hijacked by the ghosts of King Tubby and Lee 'Scratch' Perry and becomes an echo laden effects laden dub. 'Creepers And Vines' is a tongue in cheek "I'll never get intoxicated again" hangover song that again transforms halfway through into a series of transitions, sections and sound events that might have your head spinning even without intoxicants. 'The Venus Flytrap Song' is a full on story song in which Nathan is unjustly on trial for an unspecified crime, but escape the clutches of a corrupt judge, jury and hangman baying for his blood. It is the most symmetrical song they have ever written. With added ELO vocoders! Lastly, the longest and perhaps most ambitious song they have ever released. 'Lost Mariners' is an 11 minute psychedelic seafaring ghost story sound journey epic, featuring an enormous amount of sound effects, sound events, San Francisco acid rock guitar solos, transitions, and a symphony of analogue synths at the end, hinting at the horror of haunting the seabed. Frank Naughton produced the album and quite honestly he is a polymath and genius. He even invented some of the special effects on this album.