Lone Galaxy Garden

Lone’s Galaxy Garden sums up its own style pretty well in the title. It’s bubbling, upbeat electronic music full of cascading synth effects and backed by tribal beats. It’s catching from the first note, but certainly doesn’t hold you to the last. Lone has a solid, unique style, but most tracks focus too much on one good idea. Every song has an excellent main refrain that gets beaten into the ground by the time the record is over.

Excellent moments are not hard to find on Galaxy Garden, in fact, it’s almost too easy. The best part of each song is almost always introduced in the first thirty seconds and is never gone long. There’s no suspense, no building to a climax. It just exists with no foundation, and it can make great songs wholly unsatisfying. It’s not really noticeable through the first couple of tracks, but by the time Dragon Blue Eyes rolls around you’ll be plenty tired of songs that don’t really go anywhere.

It makes for excellent background music, because the record really does sound good. All the tracks are well put together, and highlights do exist. The collaborations with Machinedrum, As a Child and Cthulhu, are excellent. They drop parts in and out and allow the track to build to a satisfying conclusion. Machinedrum seems to have a way of tempering Lone’s tendency to get stuck, and Lone seems to keep Machinedrum from layering on too many vocal samples. They sound better together than they ever do by themselves.

Lone clearly knows how to assemble the main section of a track; he just doesn’t seem to be able to fit it all together. Machinedrum does, and the one big thing I keep taking away from the record is the desire to see them collaborate even more. Without him, it’s a well assembled but dull record. With him, it’s sublime.