4 out of 5

Label: Fonolith

Produced by: Neil Scrivin

Check out The Night Monitor’s logo – you want to hang out in the world it suggests, don’t you? Black and white broadcasts; faux moonscapes that we know aren’t real but have the ability to creep us out anyway; sci-fi scares or wonders from a time when it was okay that they didn’t make “sense,” or weren’t some divisive conspiracy…

The first NM release was a delight, but it leaned into the supernatural. That might’ve been the initial premise for the project, with Neil expanding into science fiction realms a year later with Spacemen Mystery Of The Terror Triangle – a 17-song journey spotlighting several mysterious ufology-related events / concepts, plucked from some key sources – but I think I prefer the vibes of these watching-the-skies themed projects, as the retro ambience Neil creates seem more evergreen for that genre, covering 60s era Doctor Who-esque robots and monsters to 80s phasers and spaceships. Specific to Spacemen, the structure of the set counters one of my general complaints with Night Monitor: that the “story” being told often feels a little stretched out. While there is some repetition here, by having each song its own story, soundtracking a concept, I’m not encouraged to try to map the music to an ongoing tale; as long as the songs are sequenced well, where things flow but also have distinction from track to track, it works.

Spacemen works.

We have calm electro melodies that build in intensity with ascending / descending synths; we have some great samples used at the beginnings or ends of tracks for color – I do wish there were some more of these, as they really make the first half of the album more dynamic – we have some buzzy ambience; and occasionally we get more defined beats, set somewhat at intervals in the track list and used kind of like general chapter breaks.

Whereas I’d say most Night Monitor releases benefit from knowing the background a bit, Mystery of the Terror Triangle, by not necessarily being a set story, manages to tell its tale on its own – you know this is the soundtrack for alien abductions; for twiddling knobs on a screen that adjusts a wavy-lined frequency and picks up a distant transmission. If you’re at all drawn in by the name, or that logo, or the delightful cover art for this of a big ol’ blocky spacesuit, the music is, perhaps, what you’d expect, but much better than that – it’s exactly what you’d hope for.