| Artist: Lanterna Album: Highways Released: 2 March 2004 |  
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Lanterna's music wanders the front line of a style known as Ambient Americana. As Lanterna, Henry Frayne connects his achievements in post-punk and shoegazer "dream pop" with moods drawn from spaghetti westerns and ambient isolationists. His albums of primarily guitar-based instrumentals move between the soothing, the unsettling and the fiery. Highways (69"00') beckons to the presence of the night and is an evocative portrayal of the dark hours' solemn and unfrequented regions. Frayne's guitar work is more expressive than some songs with lyrics. Thought of as "instrumentals that speak", Lanterna provides an entire landscape of sound, created with just a guitar. Often, Frayne is exploring the possibilities of playing his instrument through the endless delay of digital processors. His rich and detailed performances bounce around your interior, co-mingling with your thoughts. Elsewhere, the album rocks out, energized with the confidence of a solid rhythm section, but still chilled. We all live in the same world, each one of us filling in our lives with experience. In Lanterna's highly personal music we encounter a sense of motion. Together we are travelling to a place somewhere between the nobility of quests into no-man's land, the tranquility of cerebral ambient spaces - and always well beyond pop's prevailing commercial sensibilities.
- STAR'S END 7 July 2004 | |