“Return to Love” by We Are Vibrational Beings’

“Wake Up Call,” the sonic epilogue that precedes the decadent contents of We Are Vibrational Beings’ new album Return to Love, lasts a mere sixty seconds or so, and while it’s devoid of any melody or beat, it sets the stage for everything soon to follow like an opening title card at the start of a powerful feature film. A gust of harmonies blisteringly flows from the stereo as the first song in Return to Love, “Your Little Piece of the Sky,” begins to play, and while it takes a second for the lightly-overdriven guitars to find a signature sizzle they’ll ride into “You’ll Always Know” and “Everybody’s Waiting,” the little bit of tension that exists as we await to oncoming melodic storm makes the eventual cathartic release all the more palatable.

“Footsteps in the Attic of My Mind” shamelessly flirts with psychedelic-style folk/rock ala Donovan, but beside the Americana-fueled “I Was Waking Up,” it’s not nearly as exotically spellbinding, nor as lively on the instrumental front. The title track is perhaps the hardest song to breakdown lyrically, but despite the enigmatic design of its verses, it stings with a heady emotionality that undeniably affects our interpretations of the next six compositions in the tracklist. There’s a lot of layers for us to decipher and contemplate in Return to Love, but for all the homework that We Are Vibrational Beings assigns us from the jump in this LP, we’re ultimately rewarded with one of the most thought-provoking psych rock albums to see widespread release in 2020.

MORE ON THE ALBUM: https://www.wavb.life/album/

“Line Through Space” takes more twists and turns than a world-class rollercoaster, and although it’s conceptually stacked with more color than most any other song here is, I don’t think it overpowers the ensuing slow-roll of “Somebody’s Something” or rollicking “Everything Comes from the Silence” at all. On the contrary, every composition we encounter in Return to Love aids in leading us into the next batch of melodies in a novel progressive style that makes it difficult to resist the temptation to hear the entire album in its entirety without any interruptions from the external universe (as I’m fairly certain We Are Vibrational Beings intended here). “Everything Come from the Silence” is as integral to the underlying narrative in this record as the anthemic “Seeing the World Without Filters” is, leaving no room for filler in the grander scheme of things.

A stadium-shaking psychedelic rocker in the form of “Greater Than the Fear” offers up one last burst of cathartic energy before transitioning the audience into Return to Love’s concluding track, the acoustic guitar-riddled “Song for the Morning,” which brings the album to a close in a stripped-down haze of vocal harmonies as beautiful as any of the electric grooves that come before it are. When the music ceases to play and we’re left with our own thoughts for the first time after experiencing We Are Vibrational Beings’ debut studio LP, it’s difficult to deny the potential that this group has moving forward, and more specifically, just how influential their greenhorn effort could prove to be if given the right stage to shine on.

Mindy McCall