On
Highways,
Lanterna offered more of the
instrumental rock sounds for which they'd become known: shimmering, reverberant, oft-overlapping guitar lines by
Henry Frayne that set some of the more pleasing moods to be had in early-21st century
ambient music. The band
Scenic is an inevitable point of comparison, and in fact
Scenic's
Bruce Licher did
Highways' package design.
Lanterna, though, are mellower and less edgy than
Scenic, though hardly bland. While
Frayne's compositions (on which he's supported by
Eric Gebow's drums and
Mike Brosco's tape effects) are soothing, they avoid the facile slickness of
new age music, with more of a
rock rhythm on some songs than any
new age recording would allow. And though they (like
Scenic) are apt to bring to mind a drive through the Southwest desert without the visuals, the guitar sustain and reverb don't seem as gratuitously geared toward evoking the desert landscape as they do when used by numerous more
pop-oriented artists. Don't, incidentally, hit the "eject" button when the music fades away to apparent silence at the end of the eighth track; after four minutes of eerie vague sonic murmurings that are often only subliminally audible, the volume cranks up again to go into a "real" song,
"Highways." After four minutes, that too fades away, this time into nothingness, only for some guitar passages to suddenly reappear after a five-minute gap; the 17-minute
"Highways" continues to waver between false endings and snippets of music and sound before the CD really stops spinning. ~ Richie Unterberger
