Universe Outer Void Intrepid Sailor CD - Import

The Universe is a side project by Architecture in Helsinki's Gus Franklin, and their debut album, The Outer Void Intrepid Sailor, is a much more focused affair than that eclectic collective's sprawling albums. Seemingly highly influenced by both '70s art rock (think Hunky Dory-era David Bowie and mid-career 10cc) and more recent dream pop fabulists like Mercury Rev and Grandaddy, Franklin has created an honest-to-goodness concept album, telling the story of a solo astronaut through clever, catchy pop songs like "The Announcement" (which has the childlike feel of a classic Flaming Lips song matched to a rich melody that recalls the High Llamas) and the dreamy "Grand Central" (more akin to the ramshackle psychedelia of the Olivia Tremor Control). More engagingly tuneful than Architecture in Helsinki's own albums, with several immediately catchy choruses and excellently realized arrangements that mix orchestral influences with vintage electronic bleeps and whirs, The Outer Void Intrepid Sailor is right on the edge of over the top, but Franklin's strong melodic sense and winsome, boyish vocals keep things from tipping over into pretension. ~ Stewart Mason

'The Outer Void Intrepid Sailor,’ is the brainchild of brothers Lachlan and Gus Franklin who, along with musical think-alike Ben Browning and other assorted friends and collaborators form a group called; theUniverse. Having spent many a childhood year together in the family car, writing spasmodic ditties to add to their very own fictional top40 ‘Chart’, the brothers - whilst driving down to family Christmas one year â€" had a revelatory moment about their place within the universe. Out of this moment â€" beyond the feeling of total insignificance â€" came an idea about a project. the idea was to write, arrange and record a collection of songs with the common theme of ‘Space.’ The project (affectionately referred to as ‘the space album,’) was to be an album that would somehow give a similar feeling that the brothers had felt in the car that day.The results of two years sporadic work, (in between other musical projects such as the Smallgoods, Architecture in Helsinki and The Ca$inos), culminates with 12 songs which vary in style, substance, singer, songwriter and production, to complete a working whole. A whole where pop is the format, but space is the catalyst, expanding and contracting trace elements of the last fifty years of harmony driven pop music.Sing-along melodies, down-home acoustic guitars and dinky drums meet large, overblown production, in a Prog-Pop extravaganza, with a tied-in narrative that can be taken or left in favour of the songs’ face value catchiness.The narrative tells the fantastical story of an average man, who is chosen to pilot a supercraft to the far reaches of deep space, to establish whether there is an end to the universe...and if so, what lies beyond? The songs chart the course of the main characters’ psychological state, his dealings with the onboard computer, and his feelings of uncertainty, excitement, paranoia, madness and solitude as he drifts beyond the realms of knowledge and into an unfathomable galactic void.With a nostalgic nod to ELO’s ‘Time,’ Bowie’s conceptual ghost and the ambience of Brian Eno...Along with moments reminiscent of AIR’s scientific playfulness, intimate sections that echo many nights spent listening to the Microphones, and the sci-fi sentiments of GRANDADDY and the FLAMING LIPS; this is an album of unhindered joy and enthusiasm by the Universe, for the Universe...and everything within it.