Launched three decades ago, Harald Löwy's enduring German indie-tronic dreamcore project Chandeen is now gearing up for the release of its 10th album, Mercury Retrograde. A carefully paced and deeply satisfying journey, Mercury Retrograde begins in earnest with "Summer's Fling," a persistent, shimmering instrumental track that showcases perennial Chandeen collaborator Florian Walther's intrepid, David Gilmour-channeling space-rock guitar flourishes. "Vanish" follows, weaving acoustic and electric guitars into a romantic, vibey patchwork that becomes a blanket for ominous lyrics and breathy vocals that wouldn't sound out of place escaping the lips of Hope Sandoval on a classic Mazzy Star record. The bittersweet letting go of "I Don't Care if I'm Wasted" continues to blend Mercury Retrograde's disparate synthetic and organic elements, Walther anchoring the tune with some entrancingly melodic runs on his Höfner-style Beatle bass. And toward album's end, semi-spoken manifesto "Cause It's Slow" floats along, propelled by sputtering drums, eventually fading into the cosmos like an astronaut on an ill-fated spacewalk. Mercury Retrograde is an unapologetic downtempo-burner, heavy with the gravity of fate, but at once weightless and sparse enough to allow one's imagination to fill in the blank spaces between notes, making for a highly personalized listen. Each distinct vocalist featured on the album-Chandeen lead singer Julia Beyer, British composer/multi-instrumentalist Holly Henderson, sad-eyed French singer-songwriter KITTY, and 16-year-old German artist Odile-as well as guest songwriter Jennifer Pague, contributed their own lyrics, always keeping Mercury Retrograde's titular winged-messenger traveling east to west in their minds, reckless and unrepentant. The perfectly calibrated soundscapes Löwy and Walther have created to score these star-slathered song-poems are a breathtaking fusion of ghostly psychedelic dreampop and barely tethered indie rock, all shot through with a delicate yet unwavering pop sensibility.