There are those bands that touch something in you. In the case of this reviewer, it is MY SLEEPING KARMA, whose magical world of sound, which grows from the skilful play with sound and emotions, developed a profound fascination. In the end, however, it took almost seven years for the great one Moksha“ a worthy successor has been created. Between the live album released in 2017 “Mela Ananda” and the now available “Atma” was probably the band’s most difficult time, which the Aschaffenburgers try to process with hypnotic, at times unusually dark sounds. It wasn’t just the usual pandemic reasons that drove MY SLEEPING KARMA, still playing together in the original line-up, to the edge of their strength – the sudden confrontation of a band member with a life-threatening illness pushed many trivial things into the background and called for the foursome to stick together Outermost.
But out of the initial terror grew hope, out of the menacing gloom of uncertainty grew greater cohesion than ever, and out of the stormy sea of fate, whose raging waves finally calmed down, “Atma” was born. With the Indian god Ganesha reproachfully holding a crumbling world in his hands, the album takes you on a journey through dark, melancholic sound worlds, from which hopeful shimmers of light-footed, melodic riffs emerge again and again. The guitars break hypnotic and wave-like on the shores of booming bass lines, only to drift off into spacey-spherical expanses in the next moment, in which psychedelic synthesizer melodies set memorable accents. Between grumbling stoner echoes and highly melodic, oriental riff variations, MY SLEEPING KARMA once again create their own universe of rousing sounds that are very difficult to resist.
The melancholy of the difficult years runs through “Atma” and even gains plastic intensity, especially in the gloomy “Mukti”. The magic of MY SLEEPING KARMA lives from the tension that the Aschaffenburgers know how to build up anew in every song, to decorate and fire up with fine nuances, to let themselves be discharged in a pointed, emotional climax and then to let the intensity of the surging sounds go with them to let it fade away and fade away with a fine sense. It is not only the intense, ten-minute “Avatara” that knows how to absorb the listener, but the entirety of the album, which in its balance between highly melodic dreams and uncomfortable structures (“Pralaya”) provides a soundtrack to a demanding emotional life dancing on the abyss dressed in tones. But it wouldn’t be MY SLEEPING KARMA if the basic emotional statement of “Atma”, especially through its light-footed, life-affirming passages, weren’t consistently positive and uplifting.
“Atma” once again proves the special class of MY SLEEPING KARMA, taking the listener on an emotional journey that lets you dive into a completely different world for a while. No matter how gloomy and hopeless it seems, somewhere there is always a light of hope and even the wildest and most menacing storms eventually give way to clear skies and a peaceful atmosphere. MY SLEEPING KARMA have written and played the pain and uncertainty of the past few years from their souls, creating another compelling album that is only too easy to dive into and be swept up in. This is once again a great music cinema!