I’m lovin’ this album from Portland musician Ponny Kosmas, a.k.a. Mars Water. I found it through Dance Yrself Clean, who aptly called it “Tame Impala meets Fleet Foxes.” This label suggests beautiful harmonies and folky feelings that are awash in psychedelia, and Mars Water doesn’t disappoint, delivering great surf-pop hooks (“I Couldn’t Wait So Long” almost echoes Cults), thoughtful Beatles-ish acoustic-based tracks (“Who Knows”), Midwest-tinged acid drops (“Stay”), a three-song instrumental suite influenced by Swahili culture (“The Living,” “The Sasha,” and “The Zamani”) and a trippy, dynamic closer that’s positively astounding (“A Way Back Home”).
“Tempus Fugit is a concept album about time and its related qualities, and features a recurring time motif throughout the album’s course,” writes Kosmas on his Bandcamp page, where you can download the album at a Name Your Price deal. Read some of his other comments on the album below, and stream the album after that:
The album includes an instrumental suite progressing from life to death each song. These songs are titled, “The Living,” “The Sasha,” and, “The Zamani.” Swahili culture is known to believe that stages of history or life progress through these stages, where you are either living, in the Sasha, or in the Zamani. The living stage is self explanatory. In the Sasha stage, you have died, but people still remember you and you live on through memory. This is an interesting stage to think about as you would imagine someone would want to leave a mark on the world to stay in the Sasha longer. In a sense, you are a living dead. One enters the Zamani when the last person who remembered them dies, and they have completely passed. Each song of the suite will try and capture the concept of each stage instrumentally.
The track order in Tempus Fugit begins with the sound of children to symbolize the start of life, and continues to get more serious in instrumentation and lyrical content to symbolize the progression and maturation of life until death.
The album cover signifies ‘Time Flies’ by depicting an older man reflecting on his past and simpler times, while looking over the ever expanding suburbia. He may be thinking how much the time has changed and flown by in his life.
-Jordy Kasko
Album Stream: Mars Water – Tempus Fugit
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