In a world increasingly grown malnourished on less meaningful words, a break from the earnest mediocrity is welcome. So, we have Intodown's Brave New World, almost exclusively an instrumentalist playground for sky-bound wonder, with a modern, self-disciplined kick.

Fundamentally Brave New World comes across as a solo performance, but a roving, revolving band of players back up guitarist Michael Clark. Clark has played professionally since the late 1960s and hitches himself to the psychedelic rock wagon as his preferred oeuvre, though the genre label seems welcomingly meaningless today.

This World spins in its own gravity and creates new mental life.

A persona and a CD cover show an individual who's a cross between Live and Let Die's Baron Samedi voodoo man and The Invisible Man. Whatever face Clark wants to present, his guitar seems far more sincere in its relationship with others. His play is a gift.

There'll be no spark-flying wankarrific air guitar accompanying a down and still-digging earth-riven axeslinger. There is no axe, there is no slinger. Instead, this journey winds through a cloudy world where sound reverberates close against black, towering cliff faces. The nearby trickle of water is not enough to make a regular sound, only occasionally does it rise into the waking consciousness.

And throughout, as a fog, travelers breathe in extended note-laden air.

A smattering ... Gary Moore ... of the history of ... Jeff Healey ... white-boy blues guitar ... acoustic Neil Young ... seems to ... Queensryche ... unfold ... Mark Knopfler ... throughout the course of the album. The lift of "Elevator" - with a beginning riff that could provide the undercurrent to the slow bridge of any nu metal pounding - is the first step. Mike Gage and especially David Willingham's trumpet slip into gear and engage here like nowhere else on this album.

Brave New World brings everything but depression into its orbit. This is not a Blues planet. The first hint of what this 53-minute collection is trying to evoke comes in the middle of the third song, "Fire," in the form of a quiet, almost mumbled reading of Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice":