Like the gorgeous, frozen landscape photographs (from their recent Icelandic tour) that adorn the cover of this album, this music creates an expansive atmosphere of loneliness. Like Stars of The Lid, Windy & Carl, and label mates, Aarktica, Northern Valentine’s music delivers a sense of floating in space or a communion with nature where the listener is enveloped in clouds of billowing sonics.

The listener’s imagination can run wild creating images to accompany this ambient soundtrack and opener, “Born Yesterday” seems to capture the awe and mystery of an infant floating inside its mother’s amniotic fluid. The heavily treated trio of guitars imbues “Dimanche” with a frightful, almost industrialized aura, which like much of the album could easily serve as a post-modern soundtrack to David Lynch’s underground classic, Eraserhead.

The syncopated sonar beeps hovering in the background of “Escaping Light” add a Floydian touch, ca. “Echoes,” while the extemporaneous piano tinkling adds an air of haunting dread. The set ends with the melancholic-yet-hopeful, “Already Gone” that perhaps signifies that the titular couple [Northern Valentine husband and wife - Robert and Amy Brown] have resigned themselves to the distances that physically keep them apart, yet their love strengthens their relationship and does, indeed, bring them closer.

In sum, an awesomely hypnotic listening experience.

9/10 ~ Jeff Penczak, Foxy Digitalis