Wednesday 25 April 2012

Review: Kevin Kendle - Deep Skies 3 - Light From The Pleiades

More floaty spacey ambient, this time from Kevin Kendle. I don't know much about this guy, but he appears to be leaning alarmingly towards the New Age scene, that much reviled world of dreary pan-pipe music intended to soundtrack alternate healing apothecaries. Check out this excerpt from his biography:

"His music is inspired by nature and landscapes and is very suitable for any situation where a calming atmosphere is desired, such as aromatherapy, therapeutic treatments or relaxation in the home."

Ugh. It gets worse too - Kendle self-styles his music as "intelligent new age", which is almost too obnoxious to bear, for innumerable reasons. Thankfully the music itself isn't quite that bad, at least when Kendle takes a trip through the outer rings in full on deep-space mode, as he does on the Deep Skies series of albums. This particular album is number three in that series, and it's getting reviewed entirely because I've already listened to the others in those strange, distant times before this blog existed.

The bulk of this album sounds a lot like the music of Andrew Lahiff, who I reviewed recently in a blog entry that contains all the useful insight that would otherwise go into this one. And as I said in that review, there's a whole galaxy of almost identical sounding music being made out there. True, Kendle occasionally busts out a few guitars and arpeggio riffs and goes into washed out space-rock mode, as on opener Dance Of Electra, but there's absolutely nothing here that has moved the genre on in any significant sense since Jean Michel Jarre's Oxygene album, and that was made in 1976!

Anyway, I'm not going to waste our mutual time by over-detailing this: lots of thick pads, lots of wibbly-wobbly spacey sounds, pretty much the most stereotypical approximation of ambient music imaginable. Nice to listen to in the background, nice to fall asleep to, even nice to bust out a bit of aromatherapy, apparently. Functional music, little more.

Genre: Intelligent New Age (IE: Bog-standard ambient)
Stupid Arbitrary Rating: 6/10

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