Review Summary: Don't fasten your seat belt, it won't save you anyway.
SLIFT! Slift, Slift, Slift... Ok, I won’t deny it. The last time I reviewed a Slift album I was pretty cooked. It all came out of an impromptu online conversation or exchange of posts with a user of this very site whose name I won’t disclose, but it includes three capitol D(s). It was thanks to him that I got to ride the Slift on a wild night of living room debauchery and devastation. Today, and that’s why I gathered all of you here, that very same Slift have released a new album, so I promised myself that this time... I would do it all over again and get even more cooked! But do not worry, friends, I still can see the keeeeboard from here, and the whole town! Aah... isn’t it a magnificent night sky tonight? The stars align, Slift is back! This calls for celebration!
So who the hell are Slift? Good question. Slift are a three-piece from a land of great cheese, great wine, beautiful people, and guillotines. Yes, that’d be France for you. They play psychedelic pop on the rocks, progressive salsa and ambientoner. Recently, I found out they even played inside a telescope a couple of years ago, and I swear to Odin I’m not making this shit up, google it. I’m drunk and a terrible writer, but I’m not a liar.
Anyway...
Ilion is their voluptuous follow-up to 2020’s equally ambitious
Ummon. Simply put: They have taken everything they did in
Ummon and cranked it to another level. If
Ummon felt like floating adrift in space while cosmic rays fried your soul,
Ilion is the transition to a plane of existence beyond the cosmos.
Ilion doesn’t exist in this universe anymore, and neither do you. We are in a neoclassical looking bedroom, looking at several different versions of ourselves getting ripped apart by the first riff implosion of the opening title track while Hal laughs in the distance.
Slift are not in a hurry, and me neither. I’ve ran out of drinks again and now I’m torn between mixing my toddler’s leftover milk with sleep pills or abandoning myself to the horrors of a very plausible sleep paralysis episode after I’m done writing this. It’s been an hour and Slift are still at it. The sax I’ve heard in the depths of “Confluence” might be very well only in my head. I have a pixel left of sanity, but “The Story That Has Never Been Told” is inviting me to an impossible jam of quantum beats and psycho-tropical chants. I can see a group of hooded people through the door eye, but Slift are lost in Iron Maiden shenanigans, and I can’t stop convulsing to the beat.
I’ve lost track of time and space but the album has come to an end and everything looks in place, except for the hooded people sleeping in bed with me. How does Slift does it every single time, I do not know, but what I know is that the French trio fronted by the Fossat brothers and powered by the drum machine that is Canek Flores have gone far and beyond once again, with an album that feels like it’s being played in front of you while you drift in a gravity chamber. Yes, there’s a ton of reverb, yes, they indulge themselves in the same loop frantically, and yes, they are one of the best live acts at this side of Motorpsycho, and this record captures that in its purest form.
I said this before, but I’ll say it again now that I’m (hic) sobering up: Be sure to couple your album experience with some live footage afterwards because this is thunder in a bottle, a rare occurrence in the age of automated perfectionism. There’s good reason why you have reached this point and still have no idea how the album sounds, and it’s all intended by me, the universe and Mother Theresa of Andromeda.
Ilion is an album meant to be explored, an experience too good for me to shred into randomly chosen words so you can follow the breadcrumbs to safe harbor. Abandon yourself to it, convulse if you must, and whatever the outcome always remember: no one will ever believe you anyway.
