Lights Karma Action is the massive, rumbling, and beautiful second album from this Denton quartet, which is headed up by former Mazinga Phaser guitarist and Melodica Festival organizer Mwanza Dover. Given that pedigree, you could call the Falcon Project “space rock,” but the emphasis is firmly on rock—you feel this record more than you hear it. It’s heavy but not metal, a highly textured post-punk fusion of dictatorial rhythms, hypnotic atmospherics, and acid-guitar freak-outs. This is a band that would sound equally good on a bill with desert-blooze bad boys Queens of the Stone Age or avant-instrumentalists Godspeed You Black Emperor! The ominous, unhinged “New Day on the Rise” could be Hawkwind or Amon Düül; “Meditations #3: The Secret Life of Plants” is more deliberate, a deftly constructed instrumental that goes from brooding to swirling to catchy to noisy in eleven transcendent minutes. The music earns the label “psychedelic” not because it wants to be the aural equivalent of a laser show, but because it might actually fry your brain. Turn it up.
