As you are drifting down a crystalline river of auditory hallucination, the gnostic beings of The Utopia Strong gently serenade you with their lucid, spiritual songs which take you to a new, ethereal realm of psychic territory. Using nothing but their instincts to guide the process of the album, what follows is a magical and blissed out audible journey through the inner space of your mind. Sticking to the uncharted areas of your conciseness and with some moments of ominous unearthliness, International Treasure embarks to transport you to nirvana through evocative world of sounds, rich tapestries of elongated melody and constantly evolving, euphoric atmospheres.
The three eyed spectres of Steve Davis, Kavus Torabi and Mike York have gone beyond the realms of consciousness and travelled the world to gather instruments and sounds that provoke intense emotion and deep reflection. International Treasure’s calming and meditative ambience is deeply entrancing, as sounds interact and counteract with each other, offering several themes of adjacent thoughts as the album evolves. It reaches deep into your ancestral soul whilst simultaneously keeping you physically in the present and projecting you into an unknown future. Geometric spirals and patters are conjured up in your mind as the multitude of sound waves from synths and pads wash over you, and you’re left in wonder and awe of the psychedelic radiance.
International Treasure will certainly have hidden treasures unique to each individual person who listens to it. The healing nature of the album, from the ecstasy and elation transcending throughout the album to the brief moments of discordance and melancholy, the album touches almost every part of the deep recesses of your consciousness and subconsciousness. You can feel your body floating upon pink clouds, viewing vivid sunsets over deep turquoise seas accompanied by wavy apparitions of planetary bodies.
Kaleidoscopic, fever dream imagery aside, the fusion of various electronic elements with instruments like the guzheng (a Chinese plucked zither), sees the band push themselves out of their comfort zone. Alongside this is a vast array of pipes and wind instruments, which help add extra dimensions to the music. In may ways it feels like the album takes the form of a tesseract, as from every angle that you approach this album you always see a new perspective. ‘Trident Of Fire’ serves as a brief, preparatory introduction, engaging your mind for what is to come. The album truly begins with ‘Persephone Sleeps’ and much like album close ‘Castalia’ these songs illustrate a form of song structure amongst the rest of the album which seems to have a freer form of expression. The latter song sounds like a song from a video game set in Spain, where culture and sunsets meet with enthusiastic dance.
‘Shepherdess’ is the song that has the most spiritual vibe on International Treasure, as voices weave in between progressive electronic soundscapes and guzheng plucks to create a relaxed, blissfully meditative atmosphere . ‘Revelations’ is the album’s centrepiece, looking to explore melancholic shores with rapturous horns making their presence felt towards the second half of the song. The undercurrent of haunting sadness in this song awakens you and puts you on edge. By contrast, the title track ‘International Treasure’ is bright and mesmeric, as gentle horns and plucked melodies create a rich tapestry of multilayered sound.
The Utopia Strong have succeeded in creating something that is a true treasure of sound. The plethora of intricate and wonderful sounds has the potential to ease a busy mind and give you the gift of transportation into the musical nirvana of auditory hallucinations that they have created for you. Psychedelic music has never sounded so holistic.