Speck Mountain - Some Sweet Relief (2009)

Speck Mountain's debut album owed much of its lush ambience to Mazzy Star, the seminal dream pop band that blazed a similarly trippy trail during the 1990s. Released three years later, however, Some Sweet Relief finds the group paying homage to its soulful side, particularly the Staple Singers, while maintaining the dreamy foundation that upheld 2006's Summer Above. A bluesy undercurrent runs beneath the album's puddles of organ and chiming guitar, and some of the album's best moments occur whenever that undercurrent bubbles up into the mainstream: the soul-singing coda of "Backsliding," the urban trip-hop swagger of "Angela," the neo-spiritual title track, and the flashes of Stax-styled saxophone in "I Feel Eternal." Marie-Claire Balabanian is a versatile singer throughout, capable of dissolving her alto into a sea of gauzy, harmonized coos or locating the blue note in an otherwise summery melody. This may be consciously uncomplicated music, a style that relies as much on atmospherics and emotional nuance as the chord progressions themselves, but Balabanian adds a bit of weight to the mixture, allowing reverb to surround her voice without shrouding its distinctive, husky tones. For those raised on dream pop bands and space rock songs, Some Sweet Relief sounds somewhat timeless, a 40-minute offering of neo-psych gospel that's more polished, more promising, and altogether stronger than most of the band's contemporaries.

2009 sophomore release. Inspired by desire and fidelity, Karl Briedrick and Marie-Claire Balabanian of Speck Mountain have been categorized as Space-Rock, Dream-Pop, and Shoegaze, but these co-leaders like to call their music Ambient Soul. An album written about the rapture and consequences of desire will truly relieve the mind with it's beautiful simplicity. Nine tracks.