Elias Meister

New York City Jazz Record   |   George Grella

SPACEPILOT
Hycean Worlds

Orbit 577

…the Spacepilot album is straight up instrumental rock in the manner of vintage Return to Forever, Santana or Jeff Beck. Hycean Worlds is also an indicative title; this is a new classic in space rock.

The lead voice on Hycean Worlds is guitarist Elias Meister. The tracks are credited to Meister, Genovese (who handles synthesizer and organ bass) and drummer Joe Hertenstein, but Meister is the frontman, carrying the lines and soloing on all tracks. The music is improvised, but not in the free sense; rather the musicians put together riffs and jams with changes and absolute rocking backbeats. The concept comes from the discovery of water and hydrogen-thick exoplanets named Hycean Worlds. So, space rock, but that doesn’t begin to capture the soaring, celebratory feeling of all this music. Pieces like “Sagittarius A” build with musical and emotional logic to exciting, anthemic heights.

There is not a weak moment on the album and even the obvious cheeky fun of “Mozart Goes to Uranus (KV 231)”—the composer’s K. 231 vocal canon “Leck mich im Arsch”, no translation needed—turns out to be a quasi-mystical exploration that keeps reaching outward and upward. The notes for the album ground the recording in the materiality of musical and cultural history, mentioning the vintage gear the band used in the Hamburg studio where they laid down the tracks, and there is an integrated feeling between how those instruments sound, the memory of the music made with them in the past and this new edition to what truly is some sort of canon. Rootsy, both nostalgic and fresh, this is a terrific album and one of the funnest of the year.

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