Download: Upsilon Acrux “Landscape”

(from Radian Futura out now on Cuneiform)

On this, their sixth album, this long-lived instrumental rock outfit begins to see history finally catch up. Onetime adornment of the San Diego maximalist movement of the late 1990s, Upsilon Acrux represents guitarist (and sole ongoing member) Paul Lai’s admirable and altogether successful attempt to be the one-man Henry Cow of his generation. UA’s sound was already wrapped Booker T-tight on 2007’s Galapagos Momentum, so this album represents Lai’s mastery of an ever more capacious bag of tricks, like the start-and-stop headfakes on “Prelude to Foreshadow’n” and the gorgeously maintained 29:21 golem’s march of “Transparent Seas (Radio Edit)”. The latter is one of the rare rock tracks to retain shape and interest at such marathon length, this time in the distant, brutal manner of observing an elegant 1960s moderne house disintegrate in whorls of pink and green fire. This is jaunty action-prog, accessible in much the same way as really, really good weed these days.

—Ron Garmon