**** Plant43 – Sublunar Tides (Plant43 Recordings PLANT43 006LP – 2021)

Suitably for an album scheduled for November, “Sublunar Tides” is carrying the melancholy of fallen leaves when Plant43 revisits familiar deepness in a new album. The artist has conceived another set of attractive compositions, which offer home listening pleasures and also work in a suitable club environment or even in concert halls.

For the beginning, the album’s theme song “Sublunar Tides” and “Links Forever Forged” rely on velvety bass and gleaming pads. Very imaginative “Arc Furnace” is equipped with a sonar for fathoming dark depths of the ocean, before resurfacing to plain daylight and unleashing full potential of machines. The usual Plant43 program goes ahead (“Concrete Breaker”, “Neon Sentinel”), until one of the highlights (“Transient Cities”) enters a paradise garden in a quest for ultimate sonic beauty, which is revisited in the last track (“Tides Align”). “Perfect Ruin” is a wake-up call from serene thoughts, when analog zig-zags alter the the album’s overall smooth mood, along with “Still Sparks”, where agile arps are firing over sluggish dubby bass.

Having been successfully commuting between ethereal electro and ambient,  Plant43 is doing everything right also in the new long player, although it may sound too familiar for serial buyers of the artist’s works. Some diversions would have been a bonus, similar to up-tempo cut “Fluid Reasoning”, one of my absolute favorites of the last decade.

Buy vinyl from Juno (UK)
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