After spending a while away from music-making, Meditation Drive – Thru marks his return to the sonic fray. Well, fray is perhaps the wrong word here because Rob Giles’s sonic world is one of understatement and gentle restraint, subtle moves and supple grooves, as you find out as soon as the opening track, Tears into Art, drifts into earshot. Its hazy harmonies and lush, cinematic feel are the perfect kick-off point for the album, and although there are a few straighter and more energetic songs, for the most part, it is to such delicacy and deftness that he returns most often.
Some Stars, a recent single, is one of the high points, admittedly on an album comprised almost exclusively of high points. Again, an intimate and almost whispered lyric wanders over minimal yet rising music that evolves into tribal beat-driven shamanic, sonic meditations.
Make Me Call sees him in more punchy, singer-songwriter mode, a swaggering slice of chart-facing pop-rock; Lower is a shuffling piece of ambient slow-dance pop, and Drinking Poison is alt-rock but the sort of alt-rock that sounds like an alternative to alternative rock if you see what I mean. It is a place where underground rock and outsider pop dance together, somehow familiar yet unlike anything you have heard for a long time. (It’s hard to explain. It’s best you just play it for yourself.)
But for the most part, and even sometimes within the songs I have just mentioned, it is an album of songs composed of as much space and atmosphere as it is guitars and voice. Space is the final frontier…as they say. It’s a place where Rob Giles is happy to boldly go. And this is his sonic log of such a journey.
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