Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Their best yet...., 8 April 2005
This marks, in part, a return to the more complex, angular sounds of Guapo's earlier music after the epic, cinematic sweep of 'Five Suns', their last album. That record had some great moments, but I felt ran aground in tracks 4 and 5, where bludgeoning, bombastic repetition overwhelmed the actual musical material.
Here, there is an almost collage-like approach (particularly in the first half of the album), with the music moving suddenly between hectic math-rock assaults and quasi-Dark Ambient lulls (particularly an impressive moment where the main theme announces itself against a Univers Zero-style harmonium drone). These non-linear, stylistic jumpcuts - and the general dark mood - are comparable with Fantomas' brilliant 'Delerium Cordia' (although with less of the concrète/electronic feel of that album).
Of course, the core elements of Guapo's style are still here - the repetitive Fender Rhodes figurations, the Magma-like martial drums and pounding Zeuhl bass, the spiky, dissonant guitar and complex time-signatures. Influences range from 70's art rock bands such as Magma and King Crimson through to 90's progressive hardcore bands like Zeni Geva and Ruins. (Their fusion of 70's zeuhl with noise rock sensibilities also reminds me of a more obscure 80's band, Shub Niggurath).
The album begins in the same murky, primal flux as 'Five Suns', with This Heat-ish organ tone clusters and amorphous guitar. Shapes slowly begin to solidify and emerge, but here the music seems less stable and repetitive than in 'Five Suns' - these solid forms constantly threaten to dissolve back into the miasma or mutate into new shapes.
Each track has a distinct character - the Riley-esque minimalist patterns of 3 (which climaxes with a hectic keyboard solo), the swirling, digitally-processed drones of 4 - and yet they all flow together in an almost symphonic whole.
The fifth track is the darkest, returning to the epic Mellotron melodies and gongs from 'Five Suns'. Here the theme that threads throughout the entire album - and from which a lot of the material is derived - emerges in almost Black Metal-levels of Wagnerian bombast (reminding a little of The Flying Luttenbachers' fusion of BM and Zeuhl on 'Infection and Decline') - before dissolving back into the primordial mists of the opening.
Unlike some neo-avant prog bands (such as Cuneiform labelmates Nebelnest), which can often sound like a stylistically incoherent patchwork of sounds culled from the various bands that inspired them, Guapo have carved out a genuine identity for themselves from their formative influences. The band's appeal is certainly anything but retro nostalgia - this album is recommended to everyone from the chin-stroking post-rock set to Hydrahead noisecore devotees. And of course fans of Ipecac's leftfield rock sensibilities should lap it up.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing, 7 Aug 2006
I heard this album playing in a second hand record store (Islington's excellent Shattered) and could not place the music at all, yet it was intriguing enough to stay in my memory. It sounded a bit too fiery and multi layered to be from the 70s and yet here seemed a whole new twist on that old beast prog rock, albeit through several filters and sound tweaks.
That was over a year ago and I still play Black Oni and its predecessor 5 Suns regularly. Fantastic, jagged music with some unexpectedly beautiful twists and turns. This is the kind of band that eschews anything so mundane as group photographs, and seems to eke out a living playing to the chosen few. I love this music, it is utterly incongruous and at the same time completely relevant to our modern era. What does it sound like? The bastard child of Magma given a fender rhodes and told to crank it up. Excellent, but never quite memorable enough to be indispensable.. with one exception. Check out track 3 for its uncanny recreation of Ligeti's music in the movie 2001.
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~ Guapo
~ Guapo
~ Miasma & The Carousel of Headless Horses
~ Secret Chiefs 3
~ Wolves in the Throne Room
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