Occasionally, if one is lucky, a disc lands that obviates the need for purple prose, simply demanding that the reviewer identifies it as A Fucking Great Album. Here’s one now.
The newly minted band are led by the eponymous Lana, late of the Fuzztones, whose polymath talents are revealed to spectacular effect. However, Order To Love is a well of taut, psychotic garage that runs far deeper than to merely provide a showcase for the prodigious vocal, keyboard, production and graphic talents of their frontwoman. The band are a genuine gestalt, within which the component elements collide and recombine to deliquesce into strange and wonderful sonic fractals. Key to this is the complex relationship between Vox organ and Lenny Svilar’s guitar – the two instruments are constantly drawn into co-dependent ayral gravity wells, pulling their sound around and between the twin poles to create a rich mesh of twisted melody. This is particularly evident on tracks such as the suitably nagging ‘Paranoia’
Opener, ‘Black Glove’ serves to lay out Loveland’s sonic wares –authentic garage grooves are re-made and remodelled amid coruscating banks of organ psychosis that drifts above a bubbling vat of restrained power. Both lyrically and musically, the group occupy a crepuscular realm between dream and nightmare, as evoked by the nervy wistfulness of ‘Missing Illusions’ – a track that subsequently demonstrates the band’s ability to shift tempos and created transcendent instrumental breaks. Indeed, numbers such as the cascading ‘Nervous People’ and ‘Silence Everywhere’ are so compelling that I would have thoroughly enjoyed 20 minute versions of both. The latter track is possibly the best on the album, being an exotic groove that corkscrews the listener down through concentric circles of darkness and desire.
‘Theater of Dreams’ is indicative of Loveland’s skill at skating upon the thin crust of subjective reality, juxtaposing sharp, choppy rhythms against riffs that hint at the Medina, the song is topped by a haunting fly agaric vocal and features a rolling bridge section that has an evocative touch of eurojazz about it. After the insistent Mystery Machine groovery of ‘Nervous People’ loses its mind somewhere in the Mekong Delta and drifts off into inner space, ‘Paranoia’ presses home the anxiety, then ‘Missing Link’ catapults the Riders of the Storm deep into the Forbidden Zone for a track that gradually grows in intensity to showcase Lana’s silkily beguiling vocals. She switches to Ice Queen mode for ‘Waiting’, intoning with unattainable intent as shards of serrated organ and guitar defenestrate an almost funky rhythm.
After a grinding cover of Fuzztones frontman Rudi Protrudi’s ‘Bandit’ arrives straight from the quantum physics table of Dr. Phibes’ darklab, ‘Constant Furs’ completes Order To Love’s trip with a valedictory ultra-violet burst of organ oscillations that vie with an infectious bassline to send us on our dazed and sticky way. Try it – You’ll love it.
