Release Date: 2012
Song Count: 7
Duration: 1 hour, 13 minutes, 25 seconds
Rating: 1.8/10
Description:
Song Count: 7
Duration: 1 hour, 13 minutes, 25 seconds
Rating: 1.8/10
Description:
So here is a fun story about how this album review came to be: me and a friend of mine were playing WikiGacha, a digital trading card game about Wikipedia articles, and discovered articles of all sorts of random albums on the way - and the one for Son of a Bitches Brew showed up on my friend's game and caught our eye in particular. He asked me to listen to it in full, write a review for it and then mark it as a "friend recommendation" for the fun of it, so here it goes!
A Japanese band that goes by many names - some longer than others - and releases albums on a rapid pace, Acid Mothers Temple has seen plenty during their musical tenures since their foundation in 1995. This particular release of theirs is a reference to the classic 1970 Miles Davis album Bitches Brew both in terms of visual language and aural similarities whilst also going a step beyond in sheer surrealism and experimentation and breaking out as its own work entirely. Comprised of seven tracks of wildly varying time durations, the experience here is a lot to take in, especially given the specific genre we are charting territory in.
The sound profile of the songs that go anywhere from concluding in three minutes to stretching almost twenty can be generally described as a "wall of noise" type quality, with heaps of distortion and spacious sounds taking everything up in the listener's ears. The guitars are loud, harsh and almost eerie-sounding, and the melodies are highly convoluted and seem to go with the flow rather than having any conventional consistency, following along with the jazz influences that are sprinkled into the music. While experimentation with seemingly strange sound bites is present, a lot of the individual components blend into one another in one big bunch of unbridled sonical chaos.
Though works of this nature can exude loads of creative expression in spite of its abrasiveness to casual listeners, even with a finer tuned ear, it is difficult to find anything to hold onto in this extensive work, with the main point of appeal being the particular type of noise harshness that can backfire greatly if not effective. As a result, this ended up being a listen of drawn out tracks that, at most, have fleeting moments of melodicism and the elements within music that I find enjoyment in, with an overwhelming majority of the content being clutter to filter out. Rarely has there been an album within this project where I legitimately had little to no moments to enjoy throughout the duration, however it seems that moment has arrived here, which is unfortunate given the potential of the band to create some unique niche music - which perhaps they have already done, and this record of theirs just failed to be a representative example.