The Mirror Explodes is a skillfully blended acoustic and ambient electronic potpourri by the Warlocks. It begins with a musical setting that screams, “English Countryside," before progressing through a bubbling, liquid landscape more fitting to Mars than Earth.
The CD begins with a single, strumming, electric guitar drone, quickly adding electronic and ambient into one, ultimately exploding into a metaltronic crescendo. Just after two minutes, the song slows in intensity if not in tempo and the group creates a lighter effect, although one still heavy on the electronics and psychedelics. Then, at just three and a half minutes or so, the intensity eases off, allowing the vocalist to take the center stage. That first cut is titled “Red Camera,” but I can easily picture the mirror exploding. The Warlocks spend the remainder of this album reconstructing pieces of that exploded mirror back into a whole. Or several different wholes.
The second cut, “The Midnight Sun,” starts as a softly sung ballad, perhaps a lullaby, the metal drone becoming more pronounced as the vocalist progresses until it becomes an assault on the senses. The music permeates your body, re-energizing you. You’re breathing it. You’re smelling it. You’re tasting it. You’re feeling it. You’re hearing it.
It’s everywhere, this infectious music is. And it feels like you’re a physical part of the sound. Or, perhaps to make sound a living being would be more easily understood? The sound is a living, breathing organism, waiting to embrace you into his/her arms.
By the time we get to the third cut, “Slowly Disappearing,” the drone is back, this time with a different voice, a different effect. There’s a melancholy eeriness to the music that comes in its instrumental ending.
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