PICTISH TRAIL - Life Slime

Some artists keep describing a lost world, a happy oasis where body and soul seem to find respite. Over the years Johnny Lynch has proven, just like his friend King Creosote, to be one of the most skilled chroniclers of a romanticism d'antan, thanks to a fragile, psychedelic folk-pop that draws lifeblood from electronics and dream-pop.

The consistent quality of a now twenty-plus-year career isn't betrayed on the new album "Life Slime". Brought in behind the mixing desk, Mike Lindsay of Tunng adds mutant electronic textures that refresh the stylistic wardrobe, without diluting the Scottish artist's refined, naif touch.

This creative synergy yields irresistible refrains magnificently framed (the title track), promptly offset by a brief instrumental coda ("Toxic Spillage"), which as they unfold reveal the dual soul of Pictish Trail's new album, further underlined by the almost disco yet gracefully rich pulses of "Sorry Eyes" and by the eight-minute variation on early Pink Floyd/Syd Barrett-style kraut–psych that is "Another Way".

Strange but true, Pictish Trail's albums are among the few in which the use of autotune takes on an explanatory role for a deep and genuine emotional state: whether it's the croaking-frog timbre of "Battery Pack" or the Cher-style vocoder in "Hold It", one can sense melodies and echoes of human suffering dripping with tears.

The slime of the title is an effective symbolic strategy (the videos are so full of it that one might call for hard statistics on the quantity used); in the same way, Pictish Trail's music is an enveloping substance made of crystalline guitar and keyboard textures, which find room in the soft folk expanses of "Infinity Ooze" and in the melodic fade-outs of "Torch Song", but also in the shoegaze/dream-pop turbulence tasked with confronting the listener with reality, audible in the incisive rhythmic tones of "Crystal Cave" or in the diaphanous electro-acoustic layers of "Werewolf Ending".

Introspective and eccentric, analogue and digital, harmonic and jagged, Pictish Trail's music is lovably bittersweet, a handcrafted artifact that doesn't shy away from technological advances, an inspired and sufficiently modern indie-pop.

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03/05/2026