Inspired by Sabbath, Acid Mothers Temple & Space Paranoid seem to do black better than Black Sabbath ever imagined. That stoner bass-line on the opening title track giving out a deep seriously trough-like muscle. A rippling crypt-like foundation for Kawabata Makoto to riff-witch all over, his frets carving out super-bright highways.
Veering into the uncharted with breathtaking ease, as if you could see Hendrix grinning in there, a fiery bonfire picking out his wide-eyed appreciation, the amp shredding its skin like some super-nova, sonically enveloping the space, gouging away Okano Futoshi‘s percussion and Hagashi Hiroshi‘s keyline fantasy completely. The bass and guitar left to battle for supremacy, lyrically alive like some malleable obelisk scimitared into a hydra-head of re-growths… 16 minutes that instantly promote this album into a must-buy .
Side two houses another inspired original, “Devil Inside,” a doom-laden beast with Tabata Mitsuru‘s meat-hook bass and cavern vox blown over with Higashi sci-fi bubbles. Later googley-eyed goblins run amok with it, fret sawing the landscape like rampart termites, throwing out the kind of insane dynamics I’ve grown to love from the Acid Temple collective as those white hot shark fins doodlebug your cranium and fall headlong in another face melting shred-a-thon. A crunchy granite overload, leaving the drums no choice but to frantically chase around it Tom and Jerry stylee, desperately trying to bludgeon the waywardness into the back of tomorrow.The last track is instantly recognisable as a cover of “Paranoid,” and is a bit of an anti-climax considering the wow of previous two tracks. Too karaoke(like) for my liking, but soon enough everything’s tripping right back into distraught city and sparking satisfaction. A short-lived pleasure that’s the perfect excuse to give the title track another spin.
-Michael Rodham-Heaps-
