Altsounds - Windmill – Epcot Starfields [Album]

This second album by Windmill is a suite of ten songs about dust particles, space, Carl Sagan and planetary doom. If it sounds as though it was all inspired by a childhood visit to the Epcot space center in Florida, well yes it was. But 28 year old Matthew Thomas Dillon (for he is Windmill) has produced an astonishingly beautiful and expansive record: a 41 minute treatise on loneliness, love, death and the end of our planet. It is touchingly realised and quite moving, filled with a child-like wonder - and fearful sadness - at the enormity of the universe.

Windmill’s debut "Puddle City Racing Lights" created tender, sweeping electronic orch-pop. On his second album Dillon’s starting point is to strip the arrangements back to mainly piano and voice with sparing use of strings, electronic washes and echo. Opener 'Airsuit' starts with solo piano over a gentle electronic hum - it is a warm, organic and intimate love song (talking about holding hands in airsuits) but projects a sense of the vastness of space surrounding the song’s central couple. Dillon’s voice is a quavering helium-squeak that will not be to everyone’s taste but on this album it becomes an asset - either a poignant, solitary warble or double and treble-tracked, and overlaid with choral harmonies. It creates a luscious swoon that brings to mind Jonathan Donahue at his most wide-eyed and astral-gazing. In fact a comparison with the flighty and quieter moments of Mercury Rev is a good one for the whole album and like Mercury Rev, not all songs are quiet piano ballads: 'Big Boom' and 'Ellen Save Our Energy' are mini-power-pop anthems - the former driven by a pulsing string section, the latter the most ‘pop’ and upbeat moment on the album.

The middle of the album has two pivotal songs that are perhaps the best on the record. 'Epcot Slow' is a piano-led meditation on death and the passing of generations punctuated by a choir delivering the moving lines “We want our parents to live for always, they won’t / They don’t want us to be sad when they’re gone.” The final note when Dillon’s voice just collapses into a croak is heart-breaking - the little boy now glimpsing the pains of the adult world. 'Photo Hemispheres' begins with a sample of an interviewer questioning astronomer Carl Sagan. This line becomes the plaintive plea at the center of the song delivered over mournful rippling piano: “Carl Sagan are we doomed? Can we save ourselves from ourselves / And planetary doom?”.

Whereas some earlier songs might have had celebratory touches, after the turning point of 'Photo Hemispheres,' the last three songs jettison wonder for a mood of despondency and decline. The repeated formula for the structure of songs also does not sustain its magic as successfully ('Sony Metropolis Stars' overstays its welcome slightly at five minutes plus). But final song 'Spaceship Earth' completes the clear arc the album has created effectively: a quiet piano melody with a brittle and quavering vocal refrain. After a swelling chorus, all sounds cease except that voice (“let me stand still / for just a minute”) which tails off and fades leaving just the piano continuing - but ever more quietly, before fading into total silence. The listener is left with a sense of fading into the vastness of space.

If you like your music noisy and brash this record isn’t for you but “Epcot Starfields” is a hauntingly beautiful achievement that deserves a fanfare and certainly deserves a wider listenership. It is an evocative and engaging journey, like sitting in a planetarium in awe at the beauty and wonder of the universe but also feeling small, insignificant and vulnerable. And like those feelings, the mood this album creates stays with you long after it has finished.