Electric Heavy Land

I respect the opinion of the reviewer who thinks that AMT are starting to suffer from over-exposure and over-production; I even agree that a rest might do Kawabata Makoto good and that some recent releases have shown signs of fatigue. Surely this isn't one of them, though? It mightn't be their most varied or original album, but I can't imagine a band sounding less jaded!

Much has been made of Kawabata's guitar heroics, and sure enough his fretwork on Electric Heavy Land could skin a rhinoceros. But Tsuyama Atsushi's volcanic bass is at the core of the sound -- he does for AMT what Lemmy did for Hawkwind until the rest of the band got scared of him. In fact, imagine what the darker, more frenetic parts of 'Space Ritual Live' would sound like with Hendrix on guitar (and totally in-your-face production -- none of Absolutely Freakout!'s studiously retro echo-chamber ambience here) and you'll get a fair idea of the sort of racket AMT are making ... only much, much further out.

EHL goes to some of the places I always wished psych rock would go. Yes, it's one-dimensional. Yes, it's basically just a bunch of heads wigging out. But when the heads are as expanded as these, a one-dimensional wig-out can be a very wonderful thing indeed. Make sure it's not your only AMT album, though.

The thing is, "Electric Heavyland" is JUST another Acid Mothers Temple album. You bought a whole bunch of them already this year, there's another couple to go, and you'll file this one next to "Hot Rattlesnakes" and on blind test you won't be able to tell which one you're listening to, or whether it's new at all or just some of that old sludge reissued or remixed. Dammit, this hurts.

Way back in 1997 there was genuine excitement and surprise at the first Acid Mothers Temple album, "Acid Mothers Temple and the Melting Paraiso UFO". Everything about it was brilliant -- the daft, impenetrable band name, the weirder-than-you've-ever-seen-in-your-life-and-then-some cover, the silly reverential track titles (Gong, Hawkwind, just about everybody got a tip of the woolly hat), the fact that the whole massive splurge was annoyingly sequenced on one CD track so you had no choice but live through twenty minutes of sonic onslaught before getting to any of the softer pieces, the high/low up/down soft/quiet brilliance of the ride -- it was almost too good to be true. Five years later, I don't get any of that excitement when the latest AMT album drops through my letter box. And it's robbed a lot of the power of that heavenly first trip.

AMT arrived not just on the surge of the Japanese underground (and having been to Japan with the express purpose of checking it out -- to Nagoya, home of AMT in fact -- the majority of Japanese people (not to mention Japanese record shops!) are even less aware of this stuff than here in the UK) but riding the surf of the long-awaited GENUINE (ie not just retro pop or post-Lips/Butthole cod-weirdness) psychedelic movement, the first to even come close to repeating the German Kosmische music of the 1970s. If you recall, "Krautrock" was perceived as the worst hippie dross during the punk era and the (best forgotten) 1980s, and hardly even got a second glance during the (largely also best forgotten) ecstasy boom. Almost thirty years later, you can't move for people slobbering about how wonderful Neu! and Kraftwerk and Can (and even Amon Duul and Ash Ra Tempel -- miracles happen!) were. Yeah, nice to have you on board finally, as Copey says. And in the 1990s the whole thing threatened to repeat itself. Psychedelia exploded, first in Europe (Korai Orom, The Spacious Mind, Circle and so on), then in the USA (Olivia Tremor Control, Crevice, Escapade, Subarachnoid Space) and finally in Japan (Ghost, The Boredoms, AMT, even Masonna's "Beast" at a hundred paces). But in the cold light of 2002 it seems to have run its course. Olivia Tremor Control are gone, The Spacious Mind are teetering on the edge of stoner rock, and the Acid Mothers Temple have given us one too many albums so that they're not events any more. Just as happened, in a far lesser sphere, with the Ozric Tentacles. You still buy them, but you long for something as good as the first time you heard that "There Is Nothing" cassette in some muddy field in Cornwall in 1986. For all I know, the Ozrics are still grinding them out. Sadly, in a couple of years I may be wondering the same thing about AMT.

So here's "Electric Heavyland". Ho ho ho, the cardboard miniature cover is a parody of King Crimson's "Earthbound", also just released in cardboard miniature form. Inside there's a grainy Ozrics-a-like shot of the stripped down hard rocking five piece, and on the silver disk it's three lengthy tracks of spiralling noise called "Atomic Rotary Grinding God", "Loved And Confused" and "Phantom Of Galactic Magnum" in which guitar god Kawabata appears to have gone through the extremes of noise and come out the other side sounding like Terry Brooks. Strange but true. If you haven't grabbed "Absolutely Freak Out", do so immediately; that and the first album are the Definitive Works. Only persevere into these backwaters if you don't mind clutching a fading dream. C'mon, Kawabata, surprise me a little, please?