Like an opulent wine, these songs unfold on your “auditory” palette with layers of flavor and richness. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say these songs hold you, the listener—as they did me—hard and bold in “storm cellar” and “Knights of the white carnation,” and with sweetness and potent melancholy in “Beyond the horizon” and “Time capsule.” The emotional three-dimensionality of this album brings the listener into raw experience in a way that seems increasingly rare and precious, with Charles & Bloedow’s exquisite vulnerability reflected in lyrics that vacillate between pure poetry and a call-to-arms, edged with nostalgia and provocation. Who else puts together phrases like “neolithic flint” and “philistine jackknife,” or captures cultural bankruptcy so perfectly in the lyric “you look a-may-ay-ay-zing”? This band’s music carries echoes of almost every musical genre I’ve ever come across—ballads, country, blues, lullabies, Jazz, and even hauntingly out-of-tune pianos heard through a neighbor’s walls. Pink Air is truly something else— utterly surprising and deeply familiar, like an extended cosmic deja vu come home.