Patrick Galactic: Flirting With Aural Candy
Patrick Galactic – Running from the Sun (EP)
CTPAK Records
By Jon Rooney
Seattle’s Patrick Galactic combines folk sensibilities with spacey atmospherics on his debut EP, Running from the Sun. Traditional song structures are adorned with bleeps, bloops and futuristic synth washes, never yielding to full ambient abstraction but flirting with enough aural candy to keep things interesting.
Opening track and lead single “Center of Command” revolves around a strummed acoustic, employing sparse electric guitar and bass as well as a lingering, distant synth patch to fill things out. “Dying Days of Lois Lane” is a dramatic dirge that features the strongest vocal performance on the EP, with Galactic birthing a torch song out of an indie ballad. “Pull the Pin” and “Dumb Luck” continue in the vein of minor-key folk ballads, the latter sprawling into a mini-epic at almost six minutes. The too-brief closer “Softly Burning Boy” could be the most satisfying song of the batch, sounding like a sad cowboy song set on a space ship, with strummed acoustic guitar, heartbroken vocals and the hint of harmonica encased in an effects-laden cloud of sound.
Running from the Sun is an ambitious, well-arranged outing, applying the kind of sonic tinkering bands bring to a double album to a brief 17 minutes. Where it falls a little short are places when the spacey adornment attempts to stand in for gaps in the underlying song and where the same minor key melodic ideas get reapplied without much transformation. But the strongest bits on the EP could soundtrack the tense second act of a film drama, one that’s equal parts tragedy and interplanetary adventure. – (7/10)