MP3 Review: Sounds of Sputnik "New Born"

[Available in a Variety of Options // https://soundsofsputnik.bandcamp.com/album/new-born]

I believe, to my best recollection, that I not only have not reviewed Sounds of Sputnik before but that I had also never heard music by Sounds of Sputnik before this.   To kind of give you a little background info going into this album, if you've never heard of Sounds of Sputnik before either, it goes kind of like this.    Sounds of Sputnik is instrumental.  I figured that out by listening to tracks three and four because they don't feature Ummagma so the singing you hear on here is by someone who is not a sound of Sputnik (A lot of that is the lovely Shauna McLarnon, which kind of makes this some sort of Ummagma collaboration and for that it's worth listening to if you're a fan of Ummagma, which you should be)

This is also thirteen tracks in total, but there are five originals, three of which feature Ummagma, and then a radio edit of titular track followed by seven remixes.   I thought it might be kind of cool to hear a song such as "Blizzard' remixed because it didn't have vocals, but only the title track and "Light Scheme" have remixes and both of them do feature Ummagma.

Now when you think of Ummagma there are a number of other artists, styles and genres that come out but there isn't really one that sticks so much as to say "Oh yeah, Ummagma is dreamgaze" or something like that because they have such diversity.    On the other hand, with Sounds of Sputnik, a lot of the music is the shoegaze that likes to be somewhat dark and Jesus and Mary Chain does come out, which is interesting because as much as you might consider Ummagma to be shoegaze (or that to be one of their facets at least) you don't really hear that part of it coming out.

So this might not be 100% accurate to say but it gets the basic point across to think of this as being something like this.  Imagine a sort of pop rock act that isn't really that close to rock.   I'm trying to think of one but all I can do is pick a name and say, "No, they don't sound like Ummagma", so here we go blindly.    Let's say you were listening Tegan and Sara and they were one of your favorite musicians, right.    Then let's say you found out that Tegan and Sara were going to take over vocal duties for the band Hole because, well, use your imagination with what happened to Courtney Love.    Imagine the pop duo who brought you "Everything is Awesome" cranking out "Jennifer's Body".  

This CD has that sort of magic to it where it takes Ummagma somewhat out of their element and puts them in a similar one, though not too close and not too far away, and then you just have the songs of Sounds of Sputnik in general which are amazing and the remixes just take it to a whole other level.    If you aren't listening to this then I don't know what to say because this will make you feel things on levels you might not have known possible.