Marconi Union Flies into Echoes June CD of the Month with The Fear of Never Landing.
by John Diliberto 5/30/2025
Marconi Union has gone through a few changes since we last heard them in 2021 with the album, Signals, Echoes 2021 CD of the Month. The band started as a duo of Jamie Crossley and Richard Talbot in 2003 with their debut Under Wires and Searchlights. In 2012, Duncan Meadows joined the band, bringing a more melodic sensibility to the group. Now, Talbot has left, making the band a duo again, and their sound has evolved.
Their new album, The Fear of Never Landing, plays as a journey into the skies, but it could also be heard as a journey into the unknown, finding their new voice after the departure of Talbot. It opens in a gentle enough fashion. “Through Heat Waves” may be the most quiet, serene and peaceful track Marconi Union have written, but like a lot of their music it has an ominous undertow. It’s a simple drone with Fender-Rhodes piano wandering across a tarmac of ambient washes and distant winds.
That segues across to “Eight Miles High Alone,” which has nothing to do with The Byrds’s 1966 hit, “Eight Miles High” except they both have to do with flight, although not necessarily in planes. It’s a softly driving track across a simple sequencer in delay, buttressed with a train groove on a high-hat and surging synth pads. There’s also something new for Marconi Union, a vocoder robot voice. It intones a plea to “just let it go,” but it’s definitely not something out of Frozen. Crossley drops in a simple guitar riff that still seems full of melancholy.
Marconi Union have always denied the influence of German 70s electronic music, but you can hear the DNA of Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Jean-Michel Jarre and Klaus Schulze in much of their music, and probably some Kraftwerk. “In Motion” is based on a classic Berlin School sequencer pattern that underpins synth pads bathed in echo and a spare keyboard line that seems like it’s trying to rise through the layers, calling from the depths. It ends in a piano soliloquy that seems all the more poignant as all the electronics fade away.
There is a more open-air sound to Marconi Union than before. Perhaps it’s because we are flying. You can hear it on the meditation of “Inhale” which crosses into “Crystalline.” The latter track opens with a possible homage to Pink Floyd’s “Echoes” with a repeated piano sonar ping. A sequencer loop locks to a high-hat and bass drum thump that carries the track, accelerating like it’s just made a racetrack-turn into a straightaway. And then comes a saxophone-like sound, breathy, blowing single notes like a foghorn in the night.
“Exhale” doesn’t feel so much like a release of tension, but an escalation of anxiety, as the track moves in relentless motion, a thudding bass drum that is more death march than techno dance. The vocoder voice returns, but I couldn’t pick out the lyrics through the distortion.
“One More Rush” segues out of that with a more syncopated beat, swirling organ patterns and what sounds like a voice sighing into the winds, which turns into a sustained lead which sounds like Crossley on eBow guitar but they say it’s a synthesizer.
Pretty isn’t an adjective that often comes to mind with Marconi Union, but “Silence is Gliding” may be their prettiest song ever. And that’s despite the fact that it still sounds like a lament, with an organ playing a funereal dirge and guitar echoing in the background like a bereaved mourner, all shrouded in ambient, distorted pads. Some tremolo-laden chords that rise to the surface do nothing to abate the mood.
The album ends with the longest track at nearly 11 minutes, “Cloud Surfing.” It is a celebratory exploration with a lashing 8-note sequencer pattern driving what may be the wildest foray on the album, as Crossley lashes out guitar chords that are almost rock and roll. I said almost. Meadows drops in one of those insistent piano riffs you used to find in early Techno music, driving the track to its furious conclusion.
Marconi Union’s The Fear of Never Landing might make you feel like you never want to land. It is an artfully constructed album with each track transitioning into the next and consciously scored to do that. It’s not just crossfades. They create an arc that always draws you further into the music so that you will want to segue right back to the first track.
Read our Review of Marconi Union’s Signals
Read our Review of Marconi Union’s Different Colors
Great review, its a fabulous album.