On October 15, From the Mouth of the Sun return with their fourth studio album, Light Caught The Edges (Lost Tribe Sound). Combining Aaron Martin’s grounded strings with Dag Rosenqvist’s unpredictable tonal shifts and dynamic potency, their music has the ability to both breathe fire and calm the tempest, casting spells of deep beauty and intrigue at every turn. The duo respect the building blocks within each composition, and there is patience in their development. You can’t rush it. Balletic and entangled, the music doesn’t contain self-indulgent statements or concepts.; it is stunning enough as it is, and it doesn’t need any makeup to powder or disguise its true face. It is accessible and poetic, gentle enough to skim the surface of the skin and capable of rocking the boat with its wilder side.
In the airy opener, ‘For a Moment We Were Weightless’, the music slowly inflates, swept up in its degrees of treble and feeling like a descent through vaporous clouds; the dogged pull of gravity is missing. The comforting presence of the strings counteract the potentially-ragged savagery of the other electronic tones, but they never feel violent or malicious. The slightly ominous opening thuds of ‘Ashen’ feel more like a mournful toll or a repetitive downbeat shudder and less an approaching threat or a warning.
The slower, weeping tones which emerge spirit-like out of its entrenched mist seem to confirm this. The strings act as a sedative, calming all other areas of the music, although it isn’t a passive listening experience. Even the dragging, sinuous tones, bitten by static-shrouded predators, can’t escape the slow drugging of its atmosphere. Glimpses of light are still able to peek through – caught in the edges – slipping into the music like DM’s on a model’s Instagram, seeping into the grey-scaled tones. ‘The Warmth Falls In’ is like that the most, its sliding tones finding comfort and intimacy even in the darker, shaded corners.
Several guest appearances are entwined in the music. Lisen Rylander Löve plays a fizzling saxophone sequence on ‘Breaking Light’, and along with drummer Esben Willems (of Monolord), the music is gloriously alive and most definitely kicking. On ‘Landing in the Dark’, Jakob Lindhagen’s pale piano pauses and looks to the addition of the strings. The two can share in their sorrow, and the music has hints of the melancholic. And as the melodies link up and connect, they create strands which could also pass for cobwebs.