An album release from The Illustrative Violet brings out a lush and progressive soundscape that incorporates outstanding blends of math and jazz guitars coded in a rock atmosphere along with synths and keys, and outstanding performances on the drums that had drive, and outstanding time signatures helping push this whole record to this beautiful and flowing threshold.
The Live From The Mandala album is intense and brings its own vibes with each song sort of showcasing a different character, and these tracks have incredible changes, progressions, and timing that really throw you off guard sometimes but also bring this amazing fire to the tracks,
The guitar work across the span of this record is outstanding but then again, every element of the musicianship here really is plus, it's a live album so you get this energy that lets the players feed off of each other the entire time letting the songs feel so incredibly alive and breathing.
This is a rarity so when you get something like this it just has the ability to pull you away from your surroundings and let the music just swim around in the air that surrounds you.
For a live album, this is practically flawless and comes through with this amazing, rehearsed approach but it's also got a little bit of looseness to it where they jam out a little bit and improvise here and there but all in all this is an experience more than an EP.
The record certainly has its heavier moments and guitars get thick and full-bodied, baselines fly with these amazing speeds and this whole thing is like an escape so, if you listen to the whole EP which is the only way to go here by the way, then by the time it's over you have to snap yourself back to reality again and sort of reacclimate.
Such progressive and jazzy undertones take place in the form of rock songs, and they're surprises around the corners of every single track that you listen to so your kind of astounded when you remember that this is live.
Listening to the drunk performance on this record makes my arms tired but it's so amazingly done, and all the players here have an absolute love for their craft and when I say that I don't only mean their instruments, but I mean putting their talents together to create these songs and write these sorts of opus style tracks that take you into fantastical places and back.
One of my favorite aspects of this whole thing is how they blend these subgenres of rock and all these other elements into the music itself, so you get these classic rock tonalities at times mixed with mathy guitar sections, unstoppable drums, and intricate songwriting that just hits in such particular way that you have to listen to these tracks more than a few times to be able to soak everything in.
This is what I meant when I said you have to listen to the EP from start to finish. If you only listen to one or two tracks you are not gaining the full range of the spectrum that this record has to offer and believe me when I tell you, it's massive, sonically driving, inventive, experimental, and has this sort of charisma to it that at times can feel cinematic, haunting, or lifting.
The performances on the keys are also such an intricate part of this release and performance and they are a big part of what adds this sort of vastness in the ether of these tracks but other times the keys are on the upfront laying down riffs or jamming and this is something that lets the songs have even more color and an extra layer of texture that really works wonders.
This release was bombastic and blew my mind in a way and when you listen to it, you should do so with headphones on or if you listen to it in the car, turn it nice and loud because the songs have changes that are lightning fast and if you don't pay attention you could miss them.
An incredible release and an even more incredible live release.
Check this record out as soon as you can.