Words by the ever erudite Adam Turner.

Sonnenspot’s self-titled debut album is out now on Jason Boardman’s Before I Die label, an essential source of new music. The Manchester trio are heading out of town into a world where the M60 meets the autobahn, where the kosmische rhythms of 70s West Germany, Neu!’s synths and guitars and Manuel Gottsching’s chord sequences merge with some more local sounds, a more Mancunian grounding.

The centrepiece is Motorway, sonically and lyrically a tribute to Klaus Dinger and Michael Rother, where the Motorik drums and soaring fretwork are joined by a local M postcode vocal, celebrating not just the sound of the Autobahn rushing by and Neu!’s perpetual motion, but the German asphalt itself. Flute eases the track in, there’s a bedrock of FX and then the Dinger  doppelgänger pulsebeat kicks in… ‘I want to sound like a motorway’ the vocalist sings, and after each of the verse/ chorus sections the synths flare up just like La Dusseldorf.

Sequenced before Motorway there are funky, floaty, space rock instrumentals (Figurescene), nods to 90s US indie rock veterans Yo La Tengo coupled with the joys of rolling tobacco (Liquorice Paper), and on Soft In the Middle and Planets, the winks to mid-80s indie heroes Felt.

At the end of the album, on Time Zones, the band return to the space rock that they set out with. A journey of reverb-ed guitars and a wash of cymbals, wide open expanses of Space Echo, the hum of machinery and a sense of something coming, slowly. Seconds, minutes, hours stretching out, the intensity building as the kit crashes in, single piano notes falling and synthetic noise flying around, before fading to silence again.

Sonnespot can be ordered directly from from Sonnenspot. 

You can find more pukka prose from Adam Turner over at his own brilliant blog, The Bagging Area.