Stranded

***Velvet Trace is the most lush, immersive, and dynamic release David Mansfield’s given us yet. The project remains an outlet for Mansfield to look at the genres that made him, collapsing whole histories of (often English) alternative music together and turning them over in new light. He gave Artaud reference points like Clinic and nods to the Walkmen’s penchant for spinning a story, but what still comes through is Manfield’s core DNA — the autumnal drama of the Cure and Echo & The Bunnymen, here more romantic, haunting, and grandiose than on any preceding Stranded release. There’s a muscularity in the throb of “Burnt Offerings,” the rush of “Static Lights,” the late night pulse of “Awake,” the climactic release of “Aftermath” — but within Stranded’s newly dense array of sounds, Mansfield is chasing fragments of memories, the immediacy of the music keeping things just grounded enough so he can run off into the ether. “I might take a moment, a slight memory, an image from that, and then build from it,” he says of his writing process. Some of Velvet Trace, like the gorgeously vaporous “Broken Circles,” reflects on getting back together with and eventually marrying his high school sweetheart. But he extrapolates out from that, offering few literal scenes and instead evocations. That’s how he defines the title Velvet Trace: “something softly holding in place, a memory, a fleeting emotion.” Between the swirling atmospherics of the music and Mansfield’s allusive words, he’s given us a space to get lost in, to find our own other worlds in.