I love it when a record takes me unawares and blows me away. It depends so much on context, sometimes a great album will just not impress you at all because you’re hearing it in the wrong situation, but when the stars align for a record and its listener, daaaaaamn.

So here’s one—I took a pretty long car trip in December, alone, and in advance of my leaving, I burned about a dozen CDRs of downloaded music I’d been meaning to listen to but hadn’t gotten around to. One of those discs was the advance promo of Picture You, a forthcoming LP by a Swedish band endowed with the delightful name the Amazing, about whom I knew nothing except that they sported the guitarist from the psych-prog band Dungen, whom I like quite a lot.
 

 

 
I threw that disc in when I was a few hours into the trip, driving through the hills of southwestern PA, a stunningly beautiful place in autumn when the leaves are changing, and a stunningly desolate place in winter when the leaves have fallen off. The Amazing were absolutely perfect there, and I fell straightaway in love with the album. This may not be the most precisely apt description, but it’s the one that hit me immediately, and I’m really stuck on it. There’s a lot of the dreamy, soaring psych of Dungen to them (no surprise), but airy, free, untethered, and in parts, it has a lot of the ren-faire folkiness of Midlake or Fleet Foxes to it, tendencies that come through strongest in “Circles” and “The Headless Boy.” The Amazing’s music has a massive, oceanic spaciousness to it, and amid Pennsylvania mountains full of unsullied snow and dormant trees, its lengthy, mind-bending, powerfully moving explorations just flat out dazzled me, and I’ve given Picture You plenty of spinnage since that roadtrip. The rest of the world will be able to procure a copy and see exactly what I’m splooshing about in mid-February, but some of it can be heard now. Three weeks ago, the band published “The Headless Boy” to Soundcloud.
 

 
The official video for the album’s title track, “Picture You,” was released a week and a half ago.
 

 
And lastly, today it is DM’s privilege to premiere the song “Safe Island,” an expansive and wistful piece that turns on a dime from gorgeous dream pop into a brain-melting noise trip.