LP REVIEW
Ayfer Simms takes an adventurous musical trip on Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab‘s halcyon psych and pastoral kaleidoscopic beat group ‘yellow submarine’.
Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab ‘Beyond The Silver Sea’
If this album were a number, it would be 66, ‘1966’. Beyond The Silver Sea is not a mere number from the Prisoner, however restlessly the main character tries to escape an imaginary 1984-Kafkaesque-Terry Gilliam cinematographic reality: It is the musical journey of that character, Max, who is uncontrollably attracted by a vision of something else, out of the ordinary world of ours; depicted throughout the album as a tremendously boring and sensible place. The quest is bathed in the holy sound of the sixties.
Welcome, to the burlesque fate of a man, and between tracks, listen to the story itself.
Theatrical, yes, obsessively entangled in setting the scene, Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab’s storytelling ambition is stupendous; from track one to track twenty four, we follow the path, rocky and discreet, of a shy enough lad realizing he could be more than just a “cog” in the system.
Max is not a hero, he is an X, Y, Z man with a vaporous dream that gives him the faint hope that, this is not ALL there is to it. Perhaps he is a sort of Sam Lowry, incidentally pushed outside the norm.
Just like a Sam, Max walks on eggs shells broken to pieces and, OUT comes the sound of a crackling orchestra charged with the chime of erotic cymbals, of a psychedelic baroque sunshine and the classical familiar Rock and roll pop from half a century ago. Everything bounces BIG onto doors opening to tightly sealed walls, staircases facing a wide sea-less pit where a yellow submarine fails to reach the so longed ocean of a glittering gray.
Beyond The Silver Sea is a choreographic set of songs sewn together by a thread of narrative links: Max walks on a stage painted with a swirling spiral, goes after his “shine” to the underground, filled with a joyous timber that reaches the sky, even the cosmos, while melodies, the beat, the guitars, a Beatles-like vocal and cheerful zest plunges us in the everlasting question of life: absurd and mundane world or ours, we are nothing but in line to become shiny stars and all we have left is to sing along with Dr Cosmo’s Tape Lab:
”Beyond the silver sea (…) Beyond this and anything, be yourself through everything”.
Words: Ayfer Simms
Monolith Cocktail Blog 