Xenoplanetary by Ruptured World (Review)

Bringing the “Planetary” series to a close, Xenoplanetary is billed as “strange alien electro-jazz.” But don’t worry: the Max Rebo Band, this most certainly is not. That said, Xenoplanetary does have a slightly different tenor than previous “Planetary” albums. Opening track “Emergency Thought — Cast Distance Messaging” almost has a bit of an ’80s synthwave vibe going on, albeit in a more surreal form, and many of the pieces, like “The Telekinetic Amassment of Being” are more structured and even melodic than other songs in the “Planetary” series.

But in chronicling the second Proxima Centauri b mission, and its increasingly dire circumstances as Phoenix Macrae and his comrades encounter both the alien Krivren and the planet’s bizarre phenomena, Xenoplanetary is very much of a piece with previous “Planetary” albums. With its eerie synths and rumbling undercurrents, “Tenebrous Wetlands” lives up its name, particularly as Phoenix narrates the crew’s precarious position. “The Cruel Darkness” records the Krivren’s attacks, with Macrae noting how the crew is “being systematically reduced to bespattered middens of mangled body parts, plucked from the darkness like a selection of meats from a basket of inexpensive trifles.” Musically, the song is all ominous pulses, inexorable rhythms, and what might be distress calls wailing in the distance.

Much of Macrae’s narration is overwrought and melodramatic, which, like Lovecraft so long ago, adds an otherworldly flavor to the story. This is especially so when he starts talking about phenomena like the Krivren’s “Native Triangulum,” “psycho-magnetic nodal fields,” and “aggregated particle tensions,” and the bizarre effects they start to have on him — as well as the ultimate revelation of the Krivren’s goal, which ties up all of the previous albums’ loose threads.