***Union and Return is the third album from LUKE WYATT's TORN HAWK. It was composed and recorded entirely by Wyatt at his home in Berlin. At the height of the 19th century Romantic movement Germany was, in many disciplines, at the center of things, and Berlin’s museums are full of works by painters like Karl Friedrich Schinkel and Caspar David Friedrich. For Wyatt, seeing these images inspired a turn toward Romantic themes. With their elegiac, idealized landscapes, the paintings offer a visualization of Wyatt’s intentions on Union and Return. They are otherworldly and melancholic; tranquil, yet jarring. In earlier Torn Hawk releases, familiar gestures and sounds—a sleazy riff, a lush synth stab, a gated snare hit—were stripped from their original context, mulched, and repurposed as a foundation for deeply zoned guitar playing. The results were always distinctive, sometimes unsettling, and often sublime. With Union and Return, Wyatt parts the gauze that shrouded his former work to reveal a lush and ornate set of compositions—elegantly orchestrated, awash in unguarded emotion, and unspoiled by irony. Having spent years working with gritty production techniques, Wyatt seems refreshed and restored by the possibilities of definition and detail. Many tracks on Union and Return were initially composed on piano and then painstakingly fleshed out into final form. Yet, the feel is spontaneous, rather than labored, and the pieces possess an organic and grid-less grace.