Miracle Fortress- <i>Five Roses</i>

The word "timeless” implies something to last the ages. Something unique that could have emerged from various points of recent history, that suspends our notion of time itself. Graham Van Pelt, the man hiding inside Miracle Fortress, achieves all of these and more, delivering them with a healthy dose of dopamine. Five Roses is an immersive listening experience, a lucid dream state that enhances your surroundings while conjuring euphoric memories of your past. For such a dense phyllo of layered guitars, synths and voices, Five Roses never sounds busy. Rhythm relies as much on finger snaps and shakers as it does on drums draped in cavernous reverb — and even then, rarely is a full kit employed to ratchet it into rock territory. Van Pelt likes to bleed all his lines and point his camera directly at the sun, allowing the blinding light to distort the pictures on his periphery. In doing so, he captures a fractured, disembodied beauty that seems like the happy accident of an amateur Super 8 enthusiast rendered in audio. Most remarkably, he manages to condense a half-century history of rock music with remarkable concision and consistency: majestic melodies from ‘50s pop, swirling soundscapes of ‘60s psychedelia, eerie synths and primitive pulse of ‘70s Krautrock, jangle of ‘80s new wave, processed sounds of ‘90s techno, and the crashing collapse of genre that’s very now — all set to folk songs you could just as easily play on acoustic guitar. Miraculous, indeed.