Saturnia – The Real High

Elektrohasch Schallplatten ‎(ELEKTROHASCH 172) 

Luís Simões from Portugal is the mastermind behind the psychedelic entity called Saturnia. I’ve been a fan since the early albums in the late 90s and Saturnia has never let me down. This time we are taken really high with the new album… Saturnia’s music used to me more electronic in the early days, but now it’s a perfect combination of old early 70s kosmische music, groovy jazz vibes, beutiful Pink Floyd / early King Crimson like prog passages, space rock, psychedelia, electronic music and Eastern-tinged ethnic vibes. The previous album AlphaOmegaAlpha in 2012 was one of the highlights of that year for me and I especially enjoyed the more energetic, Hawkwind styled space rock tracks like the opener "I Am Utopia", that I have been playing a lot as a DJ. The Real High is very relaxed and floating almost all the way, so don’t expect much up-beat hard rocking this time, except parts of the fourth track "Mandrake Scream" etc. The music is very smooth, peaceful, relaxing and somehow healing, at least spiritually. You feel better after listening to this stuff, which is great. Too much of today’s music is dark, aggressive and gloomy, but not Saturnia. This is the perfect soundtrack to a peaceful, enjoyable and cosmic hippie summer and created to make you feel good, not bad. Excellent! The instrumentation is pretty varied with tons of synthesizers, organ, guitar, bass, drums, percussion and various acoustic instruments like sitar, tampura, gong etc, and the soft, soulful vocals are sublime.

There are eight tracks on the CD and vinyl, that is not available yet. My favourites are probably the the title track "The Real High" (just check the amazing video!) and the celestial "Heavenly Bodies", but I really like all the tracks a lot so there are no fillers. As usual, Luís has a couple of collaborators on the album: Tiagp Margues plays the amazing Moog solo on "Most Beautiful" and Adelaide Simões does the heavenly vocals and speech on the ethereal last song "Shells". This is the perfect album to listen to when you want to relax and feel fine and uplifted. Just check it out!

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