Ulrich Schnauss - Medusa

I've just come back from a nice holiday on the Isle Of Wight, which is one of my favourite places in the world. Ulrich Schnauss's new album 'Goodbye' is out soon and, a few weeks ago, I hated it. Now I love it like a wayward child.

The Isle Of Wight is hardly, say, Wyoming, but a brief switch from the teeming, toppling oppression of London to a relaxed, manageable, mostly seafaring and rural little rock was exactly the shift I needed to appreciate the album's widescreen, none-more-epicness. Probably something to do with the cheery, rolling, green, pleasant hills contrasting with the far-away grey and gloomy jostle of the surly Solent. (It rained a lot).

Ulrich Schnauss is a man who probably finds concepts like 'melody' a bit quaint. He works in broad, swooping brush-strokes; splattering his canvas with interlocking, often overwhelming textures. He conjures panoramic, windswept, abstract landscapes; dream-woven with gale-force sighs, glittering despair, lurching euphoria... Every individual note yawns and howls and reverberates like it's glancing off the wall of a bottomless pit.

He used to listen to a lot of My Bloody Valentine, see. And, with 'Goodbye', he's clearly tried to make his own private 'Loveless'.

And, in his own doleful little way, he's succeeded.

You have to admire any musician for whom 'making music' simply isn't enough. Like Kevin Shields, 16-odd years ago, Schnauss is aiming higher - for alchemy. Turning rough to smooth, discord to harmony, lament to eulogy...

'Medusa' is like charging, head-down, through a clattering rainstorm, being dive-bombed by thunderclaps, to emerge at the end in a spotlight of hopeful sunbeams. (Check that closing swell of heavenly choir).

And God bless him for contrasting all the melodrama with that kinky little four-note popcorn-pop. (Crank the volume in the last five seconds and you can hear the kernels zapping in the microwave).

[MP3] Ulrich Schnauss - Medusa