Lights Out Asia’s Garmonia is a middle-of-the-night car ride soundtrack. It's the songs you imagine yourself composing when scrolling through all the different patches on an awesome keyboard you can never afford. It’s an embryonic journey of mellow tunes that would not feel out of place on an episode of The X-Files.

The samples and atmospheric music combine together to create a great nighttime soundtrack that may remind you of Enigma, Sigur Ros, and Depeche Mode. This reverb-soaked meditation is a great disc to work, drive, or make sweet love to.

It’s hard to believe that music this ethereal could come out of the frigid wastelands of Wisconsin, but it does. Perhaps it’s something about the icy stillness of –25 degree days, or the way the once-soothing lake turns to a hardened sheet of glass. Whatever the reason, Lights Out Asia has created a great disc that could become the soundtrack to your life.

AAs elegant as Sigur Ros.
As cinematic as godspeed you black emperor.
As chilling as Mum.
As stately as Yellow 6.

Maybe you are in love, that buzz feeling flitting around your senses like some kind of charging dynamo making you impervious and whole, allowing to walk as if on air.

Maybe you’ve split up from a relationship, the wounds still open, the days appearing painfully long with each passing sunrise, the nights ever more lonely, the sense of loss ever more hurting.

‘Garmonia’ understands those opposing emotions, within its delicate treads it plays sparring partners to the loved and offers a shoulder to cry for the unloved.

Recently found touring with the likes of Mogwai and Papa M, Lights out Asia born from former members of Aurore Rien evoke heart aching grandeur on a colossal scale. ‘Garmonia’ is their debut album and if you think the names bandied around at the beginning of the review where merely some sort of casual attention grabbers, then think again, long and hard.

Lights out Asia create absorbing crystalline ambient symphonies that serenade docile trip hop beats to create longing atmospherics, a place of melting melodies to make the heart wander, curvaceous stuff that skips discreetly across the pools spacerock, electronica and post rock and which smoothly, with the speed of a blinking of the eye, draw you in to romance, invigorate and leave you dumbstruck at the spectral haze with which they softly smother you within. It’s all about poise and creating moods.

‘Garmonia’ at eleven tracks in length is deeply personal, it’s a private thing that’s intimately cast mostly with a meditive glaze, opening with the glacial like ‘Knock Knock’ which suggestively flickers with all the luminescence of a fairy tale grotto clutching to its inner warmth an exotic cocktail of tingling pianos, playground babble and echoing sound scapes. ‘You’re all on display’ dips in tempo, pensively wrapped around tantalising clockwork mechanics that gathers in stature a though initially frozen and now slowly melting in the glare of a rising sun, try thinking Boards of Canada on a polar expedition with Ryuichi Sakamoto. We could also mention the charged enchantment of the sophisticated drama unravelling within ‘Hail Russia’ the closest point at which the ensemble go head to head with GSYBE, or marvel at ‘Not every day’s a victory’ where it’s as though your ushered in to see Slowdive at full tilt weaving their celestially formed melancholia but then if you needed any affirmation we’d point you in the direction of ‘Promontory / Cemetery’. Despite its seemingly doom laden title is simply stupefying, slyly caught between simplistic spellbinding grooves that subtly nod towards Yousou N’Dour and formed from the same stuff that holds heavenly bodies together, beautiful simply isn’t a description that truly does it justice.

This Milwaukee duo – composed of former Aurora Rien members – has its finger on the pulse of some strange, extremely laid-back animal. The layered, twinkling instrumentals on “Garmonia” reek of incense, expensive weed and curry. It would be simple to compare this to Mogwai, since that name appears about five times on the press sheet, and Lights Out Asia has toured with them, but I’ll resist. Sure, it’s post-rock. But what the fuck does that mean? Critics, methinks, are to blame for everyone slapping that label on anything that doesn’t sound like either Sonic Youth or Aphex Twin. Lights Out Asia mines a more ambient tunnel, where water drips in slow-motion onto drugged-out ravers and city streets swallow you whole. At once electronic and organic, dated and forward-looking, “Garmonia” is a melodic, satisfyingly dense soundtrack for your next group cat burglary.

Lights Out Asia is one of those great obscure but promising groups that Id never heard of until their album showed up in my mailbox. Best described as ambient post-rock with electronic beats, Garmonia is suggestive of Sigur Ros, Mogwai, Radiohead, and the softer moments of Buckethead but not derivative of any of these. Even more so than is in typical post-rock, Lights Out Asia takes the emphasis off of the rock and puts it on the post? Okay, lets say they put the emphasis on the feeling. Lights Out Asia is almost making straight ambient music, except more interesting, more intense, and capable of much greater emotional power. The instrumentation is very lushthough not overblown or overproducedand nothing short of gorgeous. Ambient synths, crystalline piano notes, shimmering guitar lines, and subtle electronic noises fill out the sonic space. Its all quite tastefully done. The vocals on the album are sparse but used to good effect.

You might be tempted to throw this album into your CD player for a pleasant drive to the grocery store. Dont do it! This is nighttime music to be played in the dark. As a reviewer, Ive always been overly fond of adjectives. So Ill leave you with just one: stunning. Even those leery of post-rock or ambient music should not hesitate to give this album a chance. Highest recommendation.

Our T is really a pip. This arrives one day in the mail and on my way back to the house I stopped in at Tims (he lives next to me) to ask him something and he asked what I had, I said I didn't know, I opened the package and saw this, and he said "let me hear it". So we played it on his stereo and he commenced to tear it apart and proclaim it "suts". This is nothing new for him. The funny part is, when I stand next to him during one of these enunciations I almost always tend to agree. So it was some time later and with much trepidation that I put this on to listen to in order to try to review it. Amazingly, with the absence of his presence it no longer "sutted". Truly, it's a scientific marvel that ought to be studied, but what can one expect from a man who hated New Orders "Low Life" LP the first time he heard it? He carries a shroud of depression so vast it envelops anyone near him. So anyway, this is a Milwaukee band featuring ex Aurore Rien members and musically it is a dead ringer for a 4AD "This Mortal Coil" LP, with a dash of the band Indio. (Yes, you probably don't know them, sorry. Rewind to 1989) At times they get a little into the modern elevator techno sound done by bands like E*Vox (which I really like) and at others they wander closer to the Cocteau Twins, but in either case it is decidedly adult in sound. Vocals are male, and tend to be few and far between. I've since heard the lead singer's really young, but he sounds like he's 35 with a classic deepish art rock sort of voice. Like anything of this genre it comes closer to being filed under mood music, but it is damn fine mood music. Long trip in the car on an overcast day, a rainy sunday afternoon at home on the sofa, or cooking dinner and you really don't want to. All perfect times to sink into this album. An excellent first effort.

"Garmonia" was Lights Out Asia's first album, released on Sun Sea Sky before this band hopped to N5md to release the later "Tanks And Recognizers" and "Eyes Like Brontide". Interestingly, while this act ranges among the most rock-oriented of N5md, this first album has an even more pronounced band feeling. There's definitely some nice, slow and pretty electronica going on here, but "Garmonia" works first and foremost as a shoegazer, more or less post-rock affair (and a good one at that).