Scott Rosenberg has taken the moniker of his previous band Pink Mountain and with a cast of many he has created a record that suitably matches the ambitiously named Scott Pinkmountain & The Golden Bolts Of Tone. The result is an epic, sprawling and psychedelic chamber pop opus entitled The Full Sun.

The album begins unassumingly with ‘Song Of Solomon’, a piano based paean to a lover that strays into romantic Cohen territory with its poetic wordplay. The words verge on the cheesy side when he sings “When she cries she floods the great deserts” and “I bathe ‘neath the canopy of her spectral starscape” but the way the lyrics keep tumbling endlessly from his mouth somehow win you over in one of those radiant Flaming Lips moments before it peaks in a Spiritualized choral crescendo.

Just as assumptions start forming as to the direction of the album Pinkmountain grabs you by the hand and leads you down into the smokey basement jazz club of ‘I Shall Not Be Released’ with wailing forlorn trumpets and saxophones swinging through the haze. His voice takes a turn toward the more dramatic stylings of someone like Graeme Downes from The Verlaines. It is a majestic soaring song that crumbles to a free jazz finish and morphs into ‘Solar Flare’ with flutes, piano and all manner of classical instruments fighting for air through the cacophony. The sequencing between songs is a real highlight of The Full Sun. As ‘Solar Flare’ peters out the constructed noise gives way to the huge clean drums of ‘Lucy’ with its psych Comets On Fire overtones and Deep Purple organ licks. The prog element in the song is reinforced by trippy lyrics like “She had piano key eyes, she spoke just like a candle flame” and “Her hair was a hammer no man could lift”.

The centre of the record is anchored by ‘Abyssinia’ and ‘Unforgiven’. The former may challenge the attention span of some listeners with its 10 minutes of acoustic folk strumming and endless choruses of vocal harmonies while the even longer ‘Unforgiven’ is an avant-garde classical piece that incorporates everything but the kitchen sink. It really is the summation of all the elements of Pinkmountain’s cinematic vision on the album. It travels from ecclesiastic pop to minimal Lambchop soul to fuzzed out guitar soloing and then, at the 10 minute mark, it descends into a pure classical coda for the remaining 4 minutes. Epic doesn’t even get close to describing it, over ambitious perhaps, definitely grandiose. You are left feeling drained at its conclusion.

The final third of the album tails off slightly with the exception being the bright and bouncy pop of ‘You Gave Me This’. It cuts through the bombastic orchestration and delivers a punchy reprieve from the chaos surrounding it. The Full Sun ends on the funeral ballads ‘Angel Of Death’ and ‘To Love Is To Die’. Both ponder the human condition and bring the interstellar journey of the last hour back down to Earth. “I cannot let go, I cannot take flight, I have too much at stake, I am not a god” sings Pinkmountain.

Perhaps the most accurate words to describe The Full Sun are those of Pinkmountain himself when he describes their sound as ‘maximalist’ and that the sum of their influences is ‘cosmic music’. The sheer vision he has brought to fruition is mightily impressive and for the most part it works. The journey he takes the listener on is long and demanding at times but ultimately he has delivered a collection of music that is invigorating and rewarding for those prepared to take up the challenge.