Back in 2018, the Opalio brothers released The Sky With Broken Arms, an album which was partially inspired by the surface noise on a bunch of Roberto's records that had been mysteriously ravaged by oxidation. On its newly released sequel, the sounds of crackling vinyl dutifully make their return, but that feature is now a bit eclipsed by a different and new twist, as Maurizio plays recognizable electric guitar and dabbles in more earthly melodies and scales than he usually does. Whether that constitutes a softening or an enhancement of the MCIAA ethos is in the ear of the beholder, I suppose, but I personally enjoy the grounding contrast between the earthly and the otherworldly and I am not actually sure that the Opalios could meaningfully go further into the outer limits than they already have (though I do expect to be proven very wrong in that regard by some future release). In any case, The Sky With Broken Arms Vol. II is still a characteristically excellent psychotropic deep-space mindfuck and its two longform pieces are instant MCIAA classics (and if there was ever a MCIAA album that could draw in the more adventurous fans of space rock/psych bands like Flying Saucer Attack, this is probably it).
Elliptical Noise/Aukam Records
The opening "Empty Spaces Of Swirling Awareness" is the first of the album's two excellent extended plunges into outsider psychedelia heaven, though its modest beginning deceptively provides no hint of what is to come. To my ears, it sounds like Maurizio sat down to perform a meditative ambient guitar reverie based on a simple, delicate melody of chiming single notes over a lazily oscillating drone. Unfortunately, however, someone accidentally left an interdimensional portal open nearby, so when he played back the tape, he discovered that he had actually been performing a duet with a submerged-sounding maelstrom of squirming, squelching, and gibbering entropy. In more concrete terms, that probably means that Roberto was going wild with the duo's unique arsenal of self-built alientronics, which in this case approximate an incompletely dubbed-over tape of a turntablist played at the wrong speed and filtered through an aggressively misused vibrato pedal. Eventually, Maurizio's guitar heads into more discordant territory as well, which results in a shapeshifting mindbomb that alternately resembles a squall of honking and seasick seagulls, a psychotic breakdown in a toy store at Christmastime, and a candy colored descent into a viscous altered state populated by flickering and sputtering phantoms. In short, it is prime MCIAA territory. The brief interlude that follows is lovely too, as backwards melodies and chiming arpeggios tumble over each other as a crackling subterranean rumble undulates and churns below.
The album's second half is consumed almost entirely by the album's other queasily psychotropic tour de force: "New Horizons Out Of Collapsed Void." It deceptively opens in somewhat familiar territory with the requisite vinyl crackle and eerily quivering alientronics, but soon transforms into something quite revelatory, as Maurizio begins casually plucking out circular arpeggios on his guitar while the hallucinatory haze steadily intensifies. At its peak, the piece evokes the tableau of a solitary man quietly playing guitar in front of a campfire beneath a vast, open sky that has blossomed into a spectacularly vivid aurora borealis that also seems to be alive and sentient. Truly, no one does "cosmic immensity" better than My Cat Is An Alien. That said, the extended duration coupled with the Opalios' "spontaneous composition" approach means that some stretches are more "locked in" than others, but the addition of strummed chords and something approximating a faulty cosmic radio dial in search of a divine frequency breathe plenty of fresh life into the piece's second half.
Tragically, the constraints of the vinyl format limit the closing "Postlude: Synchronization Of Light" to a mere three minutes, but they are at least three absolutely gorgeous minutes as delicately tumbling melodies twinkle and ripple in a lysergic soup of smearing electronics, whooshes, crackles, and submerged rumble. As far as closing statements go, it is a hard one to top, as it feels like the alien equivalent of riding off into the sunset, which lies somewhere between "slowly sinking into a gently rippling sea of bliss" and "dissolving into pure light." I am tempted to demand that someone commission the Opalios to do a live soundtrack to Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris immediately, but it would probably be closer to the mark to say that if a psychedelic and sentient dream-harvesting ocean made an album, it would probably sound a lot like this. In short, this is yet another endlessly fascinating and unique My Cat Is An Alien album (and an unusually accessible one at that).
