Lashes seem like the staging ground for a diseasing act. Only one where the person you think you are dematerialized and the person you actually are emerges from the recesses of the unconscious. A fathomless, centerless whole- a dream with no egress, a cathedral with no floor. It's one of those albums that has enough depth that you can sense yourself sinking into it. Like you've been gazing into your own reflection, and then suddenly, it's no longer your reflection but a ripple of tension running across a small pool that you're just about to breach with your face, like an ice cube splashing into a glass of vodka. The New Zealand duo Hysterical Love Project have synthesized something so strange and beautiful with Lashes that it could cause Narcissus to pry his entranced stare away from his own visage, lured by the distant riveting pluck of its rhythms, and stayed from his mythic fate long enough to be saved from the deadly embrace of his echo. They have cultivated an enigmatic chamber of sonic sense operations that absorbs all light that transgresses its barrier and keeps it suspended like fireflies in a mote of obsidian. Languorous, teary and affected with dispirit, the vocals wind through the evenly spaced, mechanical rotation of beats with the assistance of a lubricating frost of synth codas, as if these yearning harmonies were a delicate strip of silk winding its way through the guts of an automaton, having been inadvertently swallowed during an incident at a haberdashery, it patiently and searchingly slips between synthetic spleens and hissing circulatory valves, leaving curly stray strands of itself dislodged and tangled in its passes, diminishing as it progresses, it dissipates into the open cavity of this model, manufactured man, integrating inseparably with the logic of his interior. Given enough time, you will not just find more places to explore within the ascetic sphere of Lashes, but more hidden places inside of you that its essence has dripped, spread, and accumulated until you find yourself subsumed within the wealth of its weightless anatomy; free to dance upon the wire of a vespertine daydream.
