Acid Mothers Temple - Recurring Dream & Apocalypse of Darkness - 2LP/CD

Lost At Sea

Musique Machine

ink 19

"Japanese psych-rock collective Acid Mothers Temple has never courted subtlety: their reverential and referential blowouts are pleasurable because they're so epic and overcooked. But sometimes their cartoon humor can boil over into the ham-fisted and/or boring, something they can come uncomfortably close to doing on Recurring Dream and Apocalypse of Darkness. As on most other Acid Mothers records I've heard in the past decade - and there've been quite a few - here they've got their super-saturated, distorted guitars down pat, garlanded with period-piece synth tweets and blips, while drums rumble away unconvincingly, hidden far back in the mix. 'Eternal Incantation or Perpetual Nightmare' has the good grace to shuttle through four or five sections in its half-hour duration, though it only achieves lift-off when the velocity picks up and Kawabata Makoto's guitar solos weave notes so fast they form twisters of noise, rather like La Monte Young's speed-of-sound sax playing the the early 1960s. The closing title song meanders along on the same charcoal-black riff for over 24 minutes, scoured by another of Kawabata's navel-gazing solos; its single-mindedness is charming, laudable even, as long as you don't have to listen to it for too long. The buzzing drone-out at the ending is a passable coda. I admire Recurring Dream's tenacity, but ultimately it's just stoner rock as endurance test, and while it's not utterly charmless, I'll guess you can probably live without hearing it." ~ Jon Dale, Signal To Noise