Review by Shadowdoom9 (Andi) for Rosetta - The Galilean Satellites (2005)

Thanks to Daniel, I now have the final remaining piece of the post-sludge elemental star, Rosetta! If you wanna know what this album, The Galilean Satellites is about, the nearly blank booklet explains it all in one sentence... "These songs are about a space man."

If you wanna know more than just a simple sentence, just press play and you'll find yourself as an astronaut eternally stranded in space with no other surrounding lifeforce. The Galilean Satellites contains two discs; one filled with monolithic dirges of spacey post-sludge not for the faint-hearted, and the other filled with desperate ambient tracks of strange beauty. And when you time both discs to play at the same time, they fit like a glove! A bit like Neurosis' Times of Grace and its ambient counterpart.

Disc 1 begins this space-doom venture with "Départe" (Departure), starting clean on the guitar and keyboards. Then the buildup comes, warning you that the space adventure is gonna be life-risking. Then the vocals of Michael Armine crashing in with the crushing music of both chaos and grace. "Europa" continues the helplessly great framework.

"Absent" sees you travelling through a space dimension, and midway through, the guitars do a bit of soloing. The vocals are mostly ambient until Armine does some screams in the last-minute climax. "Itinerant" is a 16-minute epic that's mostly piano-based. It's great, but the epic I prefer is "Au Pays Natal" (The Homeland), 13 and a half minutes of the best isolated post-sludge madness ever heard!

Disc 2 is the ambient counterpart where the space-man has already died from lack of food, water, and air as if floating through the infinite universe alone. Both that scenario and the ambient sound sculpture can be enough to give you agoraphobia, which fortunately I don't have. This creepy reverb can give you feelings of loss, and it's a nice effect that would be nice if you're in the mood for that. It's interesting how I, a heavier metalheads who's not usually into ambient music, feel more immersed by this disc than the first. It's an aural adventure well-crafted!

Whether one of the two discs or both at the same time, the listener has to be absolutely determined. Clearly, it wasn't made easy with all tracks going over 8 minutes, but it sure looks like it was. The Galilean Satellites is no easy task. If you're driving while listening to the album on your radio, it's not for a small errand trip, it's for a cross-state road trip made epic. But it's better to listen to the album at home on your computer or MP3 player if you really want a perfect post-sludge trip out of reality!

Favorites: "Europa", "Absent", "Au Pays Natal", the complete Disc 2