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After a ten year hiatus, Thirteen Senses return with a new album that, appropriately opens with a ten minute track. The Bound and the Infinite is a collection of songs made by a band unencumbered by any of the pressures so prevalent in modern music and unashamedly made for the joy of creation with no focus on potential sales, impact, or fitting into a prevailing trend. The result is astounding. An ambitious, expansive, unashamedly beautiful collection of melody and poise that captures both the freedom of creation engendered by the lack of pressure and the cumulative songwriting abilities of four musicians with years of hard-won experience of how to create. It is, appropriately, an album out of time with prevailing trends that captures the widescreen soundscapes that have always been at the heart of the band’s music but adds a maturity and willingness to experiment with embellishments that capture the listener, from the flashes of Kurt Weil in ‘Sublunar’ and ‘The Wild’ to the Santana flourishes of ‘Ivy’ through to ‘Life and Deathless’, the Vangelis inspired epic that opens the album. The Bound and the Infinite is unexpected, the sound of four friends for life rediscovering their joy in creating and playing together, an album that stands on its own merits, created if not in secrecy, then certainly in seclusion and containing a pure expression of its makers’ desires.