Album Review: Amplifier - Gargantuan
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Mancunian post rock / alt rock / psychedelic duo, Amplifier, finally release their Gargantuan album; it’s their eighth studio record and was original conceived as the follow-up to 2017’s Trippin’ With Dr Faustus, with five of those tracks seeing the light of day as part of the Hologram record in 2023.
In many ways, Gargantuan 2025 is a very different beast than it might have been had it been recorded and released before the unfortunate events of the start of this decade, with the core of the band – drummer, Matt Brobin and Sel Balamir handling strings and vocals – reconvening to smash out some Space Rock jams, just like Amplifier’s early days.
Hard as it is to believe – and Gargantuan is not a hyperbolic title by any stretch of the imagination – but those early sessions found Sel and Matt playing silently through headphones, jamming longer pieces until they found their collective groove and isolated those elements into the nine tracks on the album.
The first thing to notice about Gargantuan are the lush, hypnotic melodies, enticing emotions with every riff and rhythm. Gateway arrives like a wave of progressive post rock psychedelia, chilled and languid, the light guitar juxtaposes the solid percussive base, becoming increasingly weighty with every repetition.
Black Hole opens with a massive synth sound, launching the tune into the arena of cosmic space rock, it’s slow moving at times, without surrendering the vast, epic nature at its core; hypnotic and mesmerising, there were times when it reminded me of Ulver’s swelling crescendos. King Kong is irresistibly out-there with its grooving Seventies vibes and more than a mere hint of the Portishead to add to the overall mind-bending feel.
Delving deeper into the Seventies progressive aesthetic comes Cross Dissolve, with its Don’t Fear the Reaper-akin opening and eastern-sounding mid-section, it’s the track I would point a person unfamiliar with the band toward to get a feel of what’s going on with Gargantuan. Pyramid’s slow, weighty menace is a savage critique of the carnivorous nature of capitalism and is as brutal as the album gets.
Rest assured that it’s not all doom and gloom, as Invader fizzes with a light dancing melody, and the short but sweet instrumental, Entity, has its own funky grooves going on. Finale, Long Road, closes Gargantuan with a gentle introspection, swelling through progressive guitars to an earned climax; but, for me, it is Guilty Pleasure, Amplifier’s longest offering at eight minutes, that most ardently piqued my interest.
Based around a huge riff and filled with texture, it’s a track that shows the band’s creative direction off to perfection. If all Gargantuan’s tracks are edited versions of studio jams, it would love to hear the full version of Guilty Pleasure, to see how Sal and Matt further explored their idea.
At an hour in length, Gargantuan never overstays its welcome and gives a insight into the minds of its creators after the enforced confinement of ‘Those Days’. There is a palpable sense of a band breaking down the walls and letting themselves fly, like a bird, finally released from a cage.
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