Pitchfork

Dude, check out the stars. By the sound of the first mp3 from Lie in Light, Cloudland Canyon's full-length follow-up to last year's Silver Tongued Sisyphus EP, the light the half-German, half-American duo of Simon Wojan (King Khan & the Shrines) and Kip Uhlhorn (former Panthers guitarist and Red Scare frontman) would have us lie in seems a lot more likely to be celestial than, say, a reading lamp. But what do I know? Reading is fundamental. Despite all the focus on little ol' potential catastrophes like global warming, most people probably don't realize that the night sky has also changed drastically in the last 100 years, due to outdoor light pollution. In Galileo's time, the Milky Way actually looked like a streak of liquid, but today, even the most remote locations in the U.S. see fewer stars than a 17th-century city, The New Yorker reported last year. The retro-futurist drone-pop of Cloudland Canyon's "You & I" evokes a night spent in a national park underneath what's left of the sky's glow, all whirring synths, distorted guitars, krautrock repetition, and incomprehensible murmurings, blending together like a focused beam from the heavens. In four billion years, the Milky Way and Andromeda will collide to form another galaxy, anyway. Or so I learned at the Natural History Museum.

MP3:> Cloudland Canyon: "You & I"
[from Lie in Light; due 04/28/08 on Kranky]