Review & Video Premiere: Saturnia, Stranded in the Green
[Click play above to stream the premier of the video for ‘Fibonacci Numbers.’ Saturnia release their new album, Stranded in the Green, March 26 on Sulatron Records.]
This year marks the 25th anniversary of Lisboa-based multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Luís Simões founding Saturnia, and the Portuguese institution of psychedelia marks the occasion with the release of its seventh full-length, Stranded in the Green, through Sulatron Records. A veteran of Elektrohasch Schallplatten and Cranium Music, Simões has always kept Saturnia pretty close to himself in terms of lineup, going back 20 years to the band’s debut, The Glitter Odd, and sure enough, in addition to producing/recording here over a period of two years between 2018-2020 and mixing last August, he handles vocals, electric, acoustic and 12-string guitar as well as a swath of other instruments — Hammond, Philicorda, Rhodes, piano, synthesizer, gong, chimes, drums, bass, various effects, keyboard samples, tampura and acoustic sitar among them. In terms of other personnel throughout the nine-song/56-minute offering, Simões welcomes only two others: Ana Vitorino speaking on the intro “Pan Arrives,” and Winga bringing djembe to the subsequent “Keep it Long.” Certainly any number of solo albums have involved more players. Simões even designed the cover art, with his own pictures as well as those by João Bordeira. So yes, a personal feel is somewhat inevitable.
Stranded in the Green, though, is as much about breadth and atmosphere as it is personal expression. It is not bedroom psychedelia, and those familiar with Saturnia — Simões‘ most recent prior outing was 2018’s The Seance Tapes (review here), which reworked older material — shouldn’t expect it to be. Rather, despite quiet moments like the beginning of the near-14-minute centerpiece “Super Natural,” Simões uses the album in semi-narrative fashion to portray a communion with nature. The pagan representation of Pan in “Pan Arrives” is fair enough ground for the beginning of the record, and while sitar rock and uptempo ’60s-fashioned heavy psych are the initial impressions in “Keep it Long,” the subsequent “Fibonacci Numbers,” with its vague keyboard impressionism, quieter melody and patient execution kept to an underlying movement with a simple tom progression during the verse, and the drift-dream-int0-mellotron that is “Smoking in the Sun” — which admittedly may well be the very core of the record’s functioning storyline, further tying in with “Super Natural” and second-half-of-album cuts like “When I’m High” and the closer “Just Let Yourself Go” — soon show that the beginning is only the beginning, as it were, and that Saturnia are undertaking the songwriting, the showcase of craft and melody and rhythm, even the arrangements, as a kind of ritual in nature. Stranded in the Green, with all its expanse and atmosphere, is effective in maintaining this overarching purpose.
And with the word “stranded” in the title, there is a modern, COVID-era sense of isolation as well. After “Super Natural” has swelled and receded and one-man-jammed its lush and gorgeous landscape directly into the clearer piano line laced with synth and sitar drone that comes with “When I’m High,” the pairing of “Perfectly Lonely” and “Butterfly Collector” recedes into minimalist backwards guitar and subdued cymbal wash in the former track. It’s more substantial than an interlude at nearly four and a half minutes, but if one was to place a bet as to which portion of Stranded in the Green was conceived and executed under quarantine — a kind of willfully meandering experimentalism that’s deeply personal despite the lack of vocals — “Perfectly Lonely” would be a solid pick. Whether or not that’s actually the case, I don’t know, but that’s how it reads, and with a return of birdsong accompanied by chimes leading to Rhodes (I think), rolling drums and a fluid synthy vibe, “Butterfly Collector” expands on that ambience with 7:45 of escapist immersion. As so many people did for so many months, it seems simply to explore the space around it, going for a walk, reengaging with the colors that go so often taken for granted.
By the time “Butterfly Collector” comes around, Stranded in the Green has already pushed the boundaries of a single LP — it’s worth noting that the Sulatron LP version omits “Perfectly Lonely” and “Just Let Yourself Go,” which appear on the CD — but the journey is the point, and certainly the shifts in arrangement and general mood are enough to hold more fickle attention spans. “Butterfly Collector” is the closer of the vinyl, and its concluding wash and minor-key mystique in the parting lines serves that function well, but “Just Let Yourself Go” manages to do well in summarizing the outing just the same, with a nodding rhythm beneath returned sitar drone and a bluesy lead line at the outset, synth/effects swirl peppering in, and more of the unmitigated instrumental flow that has served Simões so well throughout. It wouldn’t be fair to call the album incomplete without it, but it is one more example of Simões‘ ability to pull together a full-band atmosphere and still maintain the intimacy of a solo affair; the central dynamic around which the album is based. That is to say, it can sound “Perfectly Lonely” while still creating its own special kind of wash.
A quarter-century after its founding, maybe it shouldn’t be such a surprise that Simões is capable of engineering that balance, but that doesn’t make the listening experience any less satisfying, and for sure there is an aspect of refinement and continued growth in the processes on display throughout. It’s possible that engaging with older songs helped inspire Saturnia to move forward with these tracks, or that lockdown played a role there as well, but Stranded in the Green is that much stronger for it in manifesting its expressive purpose. There is an element of escapism — or at very least there can be — in terms of hearing it. One might be tempted to turn off one’s mind, relax, and float downstream. But Simões isn’t so much dropping out here as tuning in to the world around him, and that sense of interaction is as infectious as any chorus contained within the songs themselves. Thus, when met with its due consideration, Stranded in the Green is the kind of album that might make colors seem brighter afterward.
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Tags: Lisboa, Portugal, Saturnia, Saturnia Stranded in the Green, Stranded in the Green, Sulatron Records
