Gila Man” by Todd Tobias is an almost instrumental album. On some songs the British Chloe March lent her voice, but she does in wordless sounds. The compositions awaken the desire to return to the days of cowboys and Indians. The covering letter calls for creating your own stories, and that is what we will do. You can every few days, expect a chapter of the story that we hear in this music. The wild west of Todd Tobias and the Gila Man calls us.
American composer and multi-instrumentalist Todd Tobias perhaps you can already come from bands like Coyotes 4, Clouds Forming Crowns, Circus Devils of Psycho And The Birds. The latter two with Robert Pollard (Guided By Voice). Since 2012 he also makes solo themselves heard and then the storyteller in him upstairs, even though his music mainly instrumental. For his latest work Gila Man has a psychedelic Western adventure in his head. Imaginary soundtrack should there being, with the advantage that he made the film without music and listen to it also as such. The music certainly captures the imagination and is an idiosyncratic blend of neoclassical, krautrock, dark ambient and avant-rock. Now you have some really an idea that you are in a Western, tuimelgras including, but many times you get the impression that you have arrived at a deserted place on another planet. There are no cowboys but those crooks of the Residents that draw their futuristic weapons against Popul Vuh and Cocteau Twins. Villains! The latter association is due to the wonderful wordless vocals of Chloe March. Also Ennio Morricone, David Lynch, Stereolab and Broadcast pass through this surreal scene of battle. Tobias draws from a lot of sources, but manages to create an intriguing and coherent. One time hushed and dreamy, sometimes strange and unreal and at other times abrasive, exciting and obscure. A wonderful adventure.
Hidden Shoal and Tiny Room Records promise a “psychedelic sci-fi western adventure”, and that’s what they deliver. Arriving at around the same time as HBO’s remake of Westworld, the timing couldn’t be better.
Tobias is also on this album in an excellent manner capable of visual, cinematic and at times making experimental music that the listener allows to dream of the evil world but that same listener through a musical eruption feet back on sets ground. Encased in a beautiful sound. This time, occasionally with wordless vocals of Chloe March. The track ‘Mirage’, referring to Brian Eno, makes me much emotion loose by the melancholic sounds. But lasts too short, only two minutes.
To apply shortly for the whole ‘Gila Man. That half hour was in my opinion may be an hour or more. The beneficent dream would have lasted even longer. An album without a doubt the “Peak Experience” title worthy.
Now isn’t this just the ticket, lead out single heralding the incoming arrival of a new Todd Tobias full length via hidden shoal records entitled ‘gila man’, this one going by the name ‘pollen path’ features guest fluttering vocals from Chloe March. Rightly noted by the label press gubbins as being shimmered in the kind of outer worldly ethereal majesty that one might be more accustomed to encountering on outings by the Grails, that said scratch just a little beneath the dream dazed tones and a bewitching folk spectral entrances away all softly smouldered in surrendering rustics and the spellcrafting lull of prettified pastorals that hint of the yearning murmuring free spirited innocence of the ‘wicker man’ as though recast by Tunng.