With its spacious atmospherics, mellifluous vocals and a combination of electronic and faux-tribal rhythms, the music that Red Shift Mantra has recorded gets blithely cast as some sort of New Age futurism, a situation that has earned the Orlando group a none-too-small amount of attention from aficionados of the genre. (Which is all right if you want a fan base that largely consists of boring people who like boring music.) Still, anyone who’s been fortunate enough to see RSM perform live should know that this is not a boring group. If you can get past the womblike warmth of their sound, many layers of complexity open up. Phoneme does a lot more to capture the group’s dynamics, yet doesn’t do anything to break their hypnotic spell. The sound is dense, soothing and decidedly downtrodden; it’s as if Rain Tree Crow’s rustic ambient melodrama collided with the sparse echoes of Slowdive’s Pygmalion album. It’s pretty and it’s cavernous, but it’s certainly not dull.
This article appears in Jan 19-25, 2005.