Code Indigo Online

Review by Steve Roberts
The new album from Code Indigo is their most assured and satisfying to date. The band consists of David Wright and Robert Fox with Andy Lobban on guitar and Dave Massey on rhythms and bass programming. The musical template has been refined and honed into an impressively mature and confident musical vision. This is apparent from the opening track, 'Autumn Fades' which begins slowly with melancholic strings and piano motif, interspersed with Lobban's excellent guitar which enters with a plaintive cry. At around the four and a half minute mark, the percussion steps up the pace a little and the strings add more atmosphere to accompany the soaring guitar which take the track to a great climax and then cross fades into the more lush and gentle 'Chill' .

Here the atmosphere is more subdued with strings, percussion and piano predominating and then subtle guitar phrases add a little extra colour to the wonderfully downbeat ambience. Cross fading into the more abstract tones of 'Vapour Tales', which adds distant voice samples serving as a prelude to 'Ten Degrees Per Second' which steps up the pace a little with percussion added to the mix. At just over two and a half minutes a wonderfully downbeat melancholic air permeates the track and Lobban's guitar lifts the piece to greater heights. A superb track to lift the spirits and affirm all that is great with this band.

'Back with The Weather, Calm Front' strips the sound down to percussion, rhythm guitar and orchestral tones with a superb ethnic vocal sample adding splashes of colour. 'Storm Surge' continues in similar vein but gradually builds the atmosphere and intensity and has a great end sequence featuring an impressive guitar climax.

'Vapour' relaxes the atmosphere with a drifting, hypnotic tone poem of piano, echoed radio samples, synth and guitar textures cross fading into 'Cultures'. The percussion is subtly ethnic, and again some highly effective, hypnotic samples enhance the mix, and yet another winning memorable melody is deployed before the guitar returns to add a little more bite before the primary theme is revisited. 'Culture Shift' adds marimba sequences as the mood shifts down a little as guitar provides the main focus before the gradual crossfade into the more abstract territory of 'Vapour Tails'.

'Lost Radio (Tuning In)' begins with what I think is a sample from the classic radio broadcast of 'War of the Worlds' by Orson Welles before a terrific piano piece emerges reminiscent of Robert Fox's palette, (I may well be out of turn here and I use this as merely a descriptive device), on 'Lost Radio Program 1'. 'Program 2' has a clever bass sequence and continues with the guitar and keyboards adding great phrases to the mix.

Finally, 'Tune Out' concludes the set with, at first, soft, almost subliminal, piano and strings and downbeat keyboard work which sounds to me like David Wright's compositional touch, again I may be wrong, but it is a fitting, if low key, ending to a great album. I wish all those who bought Dave Gilmour's recent solo outing could hear this album. Whatever the undoubted merits of the former release, I have played and enjoyed Code Indigo more.

To compare 'Chill' to Pink Floyd seems a little lazy, and guilty of all the hallmarks of the hyperbole sometimes seen in review listings, but I genuinely believe that Code indigo deserve to be heard to enable people to make up their own minds. If my own personal experience is anything to go by, with individuals instantly converted, then a wider audience is theirs, if, and I know it is a big IF, they can only be heard. This has been true of other EM artists I know, but that does not make it any easier to take.

'Chill' is the finest Code Indigo album so far and that in itself is a great achievement.

Steve Roberts

Chill

Review by CDS

This is one of the year's big releases for not one, but two music genres, because 'Chill' is a real crossover classic!

It takes a complete listen to provide an overview of what it's all about, and the first thing to say is that it's another epic - nearly seventy-seven minutes long - but an epic that is just SO good. Secondly, like the recent AD Music albums 'Signal To The Stars' by Callisto, and 'Deeper' by David Wright, Chill is an album of genuine music quality, accessibility, writing & arranging with the ability to produce predominantly synth-based music that "relates" as much, if not more, to the likes of early Mike Oldfield and mid-seventies Pink Floyd, as it does to the "greats" of the Electronic Music world.

So, what you have here is the quartet of David Wright, Robert Fox, Dave Massey and, most crucially, Andy Lobban on lead and rhythm guitars. I say "most crucially" for, although this is a keyboards dominated album, the guitar work is what gives it that all-important extra-special ingredient, and the reason you hark back to the classic work of Oldfield and Floyd.

The opening track sets the scene for, and the flavour of this album to perfection, with its gorgeous but strong synth moods and the soaring electric guitar work, giving the whole thing very much of a 'Wish You Were Here'-era Floyd feel, but with so much more depth and soundscapes courtesy of the superbly emotive and melodic synth work of Fox and Wright. And what follows is absolutely spellbinding - rarely will you hear music of this quality unfold so exquisitely, and to an extent that every track carries you along with it in such a way that you listen to it as one complete piece of music with so many ideas, all perfectly executed.

'Chill' is so much more that just a "synth music" album, if fact it's potential audience is far greater than even the largest fan-base that this genre of music can offer, spreading into the realms of "symphonic rock" and beyond. No doubt about it - 'Chill' really is a crossover classic!