Transmalinnia
(Knitting Factory) 
Oakland quintet Lumerians are yet another Bay Area band interested in the fine art of launching your mind into distant, weirder realms. Their debut album, Transmalinnia, is named after Eugene Von Bruenchenhein's Voyage into Space series, and it's a tone-perfect visual analogue to the sound Lumerians create (seriously, check out the album art).
"Burning Mirrors" kicks off Transmalinnia with driving, throbbing, metronomic garage rock embellished by radioactive keyboard whorls, like some ideal convergence of Hawkwind and Suicide. It's matched by "Calalini Rises," a gradually accelerating, ominous steamroller of a song, a soundtrack to zooming out of this world amid a welter of alien shrieks, shuddering engines, and relentless tambourine shakes. On the other end of the spectrum, "Atlanta Brook" is languid, sexy psychedelia that slowly ascends into a glistening, spectral realm where zits don't exist and you never have a bad hair day, and "Longwave" moves at an opiated trudge, adorned with benumbed female vocals (actually, everyone in Lumerians sings as if they were nearly catatonic—a good thing here), as it descends into a molasses-y, transcendental bellow, like My Bloody Valentine's "Soon" played at 16 rpm.
The tracks that will garner Lumerians the most airplay and strongest dance-floor reaction are "Black Tusk," "Xulux," and "Hashshashin." All three could score some subterranean version of Austin Powers, although their hip-swiveling beats are wreathed in some fairly eerie and menacing sci-fi-flick textures. Overall, Transmalinnia introduces a group capable of instigating party time and transporting your consciousness to an approximation of 2001: A Space Odyssey's "star gate" sequence. 
