Pocket Fantasy could be either a dream come true or the worst nightmare for someone with synesthesia. Dream because it is an uncanny but simple parade of delights. A nightmare due to the relentless motion of its sunny apprehensions. The album is restful in its mooring at the center of these pivoting symptoms of emotion, time, harmony and humanity. For those who are especially sensitive to its messy, permanently inchoate structures, it must be like drowning in their favorite flavor of ice cream. For the rest of us, it might be as close as we come to understanding the subjective shades through which those lucky few experience sound. Listening to the traveling, wonder-band Mamalarky's second LP is like observing an expressionistic painting rendered in mid-air. Melodies twirl and splatter in flight, colliding and blending, exchanging pigments in passing, before slushing onto the canvas of your ears in interpretive swashs and globs. A rorschach of honey and hue that displaces the border between the real and the imaginary with a rainbow bridge to a boundless psychic festival that unfurls outward like a fast-blossoming orchid. "Mythical Bonds" explodes in ripples of manifold, LED-like patterns that tug you forward, as if by a spell, into the wrapped embrace of the one who you dare to dream might willingly receive the warmth of your heart. "You Know I Know" contains a crushed, yellow and gold palette that fragrantly smears itself on your face and clothes as you pass through it as if it were depositing evidence of a headlong charge through a field of tall flowers. "Building Castles" is cut through with piercing beams of purple and white rays, like city lights bouncing back from the camouflaged hull of a spaceship that hovers high above the skyline- a giant hidden disco ball of extraterrestrial origins. As a track with one of the more muscular grooves, "Shining Armor" repels with its chrome-blue coating any wary impore against its advancing acceleration, rotating with an absolute absence of resistance until it is virtually levitating in the throes of its own defiance. Turely a wondrous find, Pocket Fantasy joyously stains all that it touches.
