The New Allanté is weird. That's my main takeaway after listening to this electronic/classical album from Petridish. It's weird, but it's also strangely coherent. I think it might be a concept album, I'm not sure, but it's certainly one that has a journey in mind, reflected by the psychedelic cover art.
It opens with the title track, a piece that feels as much like something out of a 1930s film noir as it does a militaristic call to action. Horns honk while drums drum, and an eerie descending chorus give a bizarre and dreamlike feel. It's a really striking start to the album, but as strange as it is, it's one of the less menacing pieces here. By contrast, the following Sleepers Awake morphs the ascending horns of the first track into a chorus of horrors not dissimilar from that moment at the start of 2001 when the apes discover the monolith.
It's here that you really start to get a sense of Petridish's love of dissonance. So many of these tracks feature these four-chord rising synth parts that aggressively shift key and it gives the whole album both a feeling of cohesion and discomfort. Every composition feels like an iteration on a theme. The chords of the eerily beautiful Je ne comprends are an iteration of those found in Sleepers Awake which themselves evolved from The New Allanté. So then as a listener it becomes about how each track is going to iterate on that idea.
A particularly interesting one is Ganglion Menace, which focuses around this rhythmic brass synth. It's aggressive and uncomfortable, but also really cool. Drums bang relentlessly while synths buzz and hum above them. I also very much enjoyed Opera for Catherine, with its woozy sustained notes and eerie choruses. Then there's Don't Understand, which bizarrely ventures in synthwave territory, while still being as menacing and dissonant as everything else here. The juxtaposition of those pretty synths with the dissonance makes for something that sounds familiar and alien at the same time.
Things close out with The New Allanté Intermission. Bleak pianos while a terrifying and slightly sarcastic voice informs me that the stereo version of the album is complete, and that next we will be hearing the binaural version. I won't, sadly, as we only have the stereo version here, but placing the intermission at the end feels fairly apt for an album as weird as this one.
I enjoyed my time with it. It's strange, uncomfortable, at times melancholy and beautiful. I'm not sure how often I'll find myself going back to it, but I wouldn't be opposed to it.