Labels: Mexican Summer
Review by: Alex Hannan
This is a great curveball from the Collective review pile, being essentially a one-man-band eight-song psych-rock set with a ton of energy and ideas. Not my usual style at all, since I generally approach with suspicion anything hinting of mystic vibes or showing any signs of trying to expand my mind. Bastards all. A general fist shake in the direction of those who lose their inhibitions at the same time as their quality control – but let’s not digress… The psyche-rock influence here is focused into manic weirdness rather than self-indulgence, and sprawling guitar work is countered by the rocket-up-its-arse hyperactivity and inquisitive musicianship of the set as a whole.
First track “Low-Born” starts with a chunk of loose-jointed drumming, splattering cymbals around and betraying a number of editing cut-ups on closer listening. It’s intricate and propulsive and is cleverly stitched together so that it can pass as an oddball drum virtuoso with a couple too many arms, but also contains structure, craft, and a subtle sense of oddity. Heavily reverbed and echoed multitracked guitar swathes the track in an extra layer of rhythmic weirdness, while gnomic guttural vocals mutter semi-incomprehensible tracts.
“Vapours Invisible” focuses heavily on the guitar – it’s an instrumental with a static bassline of a single note, but with several gear changes into different grooves and levels of urgency. The guitar spills out four minutes of art-damaged blues, remaining free to swoop around atonally at will.
“A reverse age” features a refrain of taut but meandering arcs of guitar and the odd vocal verse dropped in, sounding at these points a bit like Mark E. Smith fronting a punked up CAN. It dissolves into a wah’d solo around the two minute mark and it’s another two minutes of wah’d up noodling before the vocals kick in again. The repetitive rhythm section grooves and fretboard heroics might alienate some, but the overall feel keeps this on my good side – the virtuosity seems unusually ego-free. Some great ramshackle drumkit-falling-down-the-stairs fills decorate the latter half of the track.
The song title “Hymn of Pan” definitely sounds like something out of my dad’s record collection rather than my own, and as surmised it turns the patchouli vibes up to 11 with acoustic guitar, the odd bit of claves and an about turn into folkiness. The song retains a slightly menacing tinge and ramps up the intensity towards the end but I’ll still be skipping it on future runs through the album.
After a garbled but cool sounding one minute interlude track, the remaining trio of tunes explore variants on the sound outlined in the first three songs with, respectively, a slightly more conventional power trio feel and multitracked vocals (“Bradtenehend”): clattering drum patterns and rambling bent blues licks (“The Primitive Hoodoo”, the one track where I actually get a little bored in the course of its seven minutes), and more conspicuously off-kilter rhythmic patterning (“Action vision”). This is well worth checking out – it’s a reminder for me that the right person or band can sometimes break through my own snobbery about certain genres, hehe…