O
n Cobalt Chapel’s 2017 self-titled debut, Jarrod Gosling and Celia Fage combined pensive musical landscapes and folkloric imagery with a contrasting sci-fi retro-chic aesthetic. Here, the pair have again built an intimate, immersive, and occasionally disquieting environment to explore. With sensual melodies drifting through a haze of reverb, these songs often emerge as if through a dreamy fog, only just landing a foothold in the waking world. Fage enunciates lyrics that hint at some ancient ritual or people going adrift on the moors with a deadpan languor. Yet there are
moments when her overdubbed incantations rise up, adding a ghostly halo to Pretty Mire, while the eerie choral swarming during Our Angel Polygon evoking the swirling coda to Pink Floyd’s Echoes or the bleak moonscapes from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Gosling’s keyboardheavy production distills late-60s psych stylings, wyrd folk resonances and chamber pop orchestration that goes beyond mere pastiche. Cobalt Chapel’s ornate architecture exercises a strange yet fascinating beauty that comes with a frisson of mystery that’s as unsettling as it is beguiling.