With Mustard Gas and Roses, guitarist Mike Gallagher (of renowned dirge architects ISIS) unveils a compendium of sparse ruminations culled from years of underground musical experience. An artistic and entirely instrumental departure from band-based disseminations, Gallagher's solo debut is nonetheless in accord with the general aesthetic of ISIS, exploring the same telekinetic atmosphere via more personal and austere means.
As such, Nova Lux is a sonic narrative of post-rock splendor underscored by barely perceptible shifts in the aural firmament, the perpetual inertia of ringing notes, and the low hum of inevitability. The five ominous instrumental passages contained within are headphone music for the drone-damaged; the stirring, vaguely sinister murmurs of a half-remembered occurrence. Punctuated by the pedal steel of Greg Burns (Red Sparowes/Halifax Pier) on track one and the expert beat manipulation of Oktopus (Dalek) on track four, Nova Lux conjures up a nebulous psychic landscape in which the indefinable never takes shape, where the horizon slips in and out of focus and existential trepidation levitates just above the hearing threshold. Gallagher's guitar-based compositions are the proverbial ghosts in the machine, revealing an expert convergence of human expression and electronic technology that plumbs the murky depths and dim corners of elemental consciousness: Echoes of past experience take shape, floating across the stereo field before dissolving quietly into the ether like half-formed shadows at sundown.