UFOm – Aliens Are Real (Moon Glyph) – Review

Album: Aliens Are Real

Artist:  UFOm

Release Date: July 28, 2023

Last month, a whistleblower from the Pentagon confirmed that the United States government had been in possession of extraterrestrial remains for some time. It says a lot about life during the 2020s that the acknowledged existence of alien life doesn’t even make the Top 25 craziest news stories of the decade, so far.

Still, what are the implications of alien contact? Are they here to take over, like Invasion of the Body Snatchers? Blow up our monuments, like Independence Day? Transform us into consumer zombies, like They Live? Or could this be the beginning of a new Golden Age, with our extraterrestrial brethren delivering starry wisdom and helping us see the error of our ways? Might the existence of another species make us stop focusing on the divisions in our own, finally becoming a true brotherhood and sisterhood of humanity?

Aliens Are Real, a tranquil blissed-out sonic meditation from the anonymous UFOm, chooses to believe the latter, delivering this short slab of anti-gravity loveliness for Portland’s Moon Glyph records, one of the most reliable sources of top-shelf 21st-Century ambient. It’s a gorgeous reverie of bells and Andean flutes, harp flourishes and bird songs, intermingled with Terry Riley-esque minimalist organs shimmering like a prismatic rainbow in the soft mist of a rainbow. It’s the perfect blend of ’80s-style New Age music and hypermodern ambient music, as clean and clear as a Helvetica font.

Aliens Are Real suggests a new Golden Age of electronic music may be upon us, as well. It’s got the soft-focus warmth of analog records of the ’60s and ’70s but without the flabby messiness. It’s also got the techno-utopianism of ’80s New Age but without the cynicism or underlying rampant materialism.

Maybe you can have the best of all worlds, after all, once you know they exist.

Aliens Are Real is out now on vinyl and digital download from Moon Glyph Records.