Acid Mother’s Temple

Violently obliterating rock and roll’s boundaries, Acid Mothers Temple sound like the slow explosion of melting, white hot spiraling galaxies. Such spaced out metaphors may sound corny, yet the music collective seems to travel through black holes and the endless depths of space. One doesn’t just hear the band in concert as one experiences them.

For all their blasting, Acid Mothers Temple is holistically minimalist. They harness Terry Riley to the rock context and subvert both. Guitar riffs and locked drum grooves will go on for twenty minutes as they gradually degrade from discernable rhythm and notes until unraveling into an electrical fury of hurricane force.

Shifting members due to passports and musical dynamics, the group played as a four piece. The Recurring Dream and Apocalypse of Darkness tour finds the sprawling musical collective incarnated as Acid Mothers Temple and The Melting Paraiso U.F.O incarnation, whose difference lies in the moniker “soul freak out collective for the 21st century.”

Each year they choose an inferior supporting touring band, as least compared to their astral travel intensity. Danava sounded like Black Sabbath/Night Ranger mixture full of odd time signatures and disturbingly dead on Ozzy Osbourne vocal styles. Bombastic drumming, dual guitars and vintage moogs reenacted heavy metal’s early seventies genesis. The band felt like a business detached from the music through advertising their new release and offering audience gratitude banter. Only the hopping bassist seemed to feel the music’s dark contours.

Acid Mothers Temple quickly drowned the room with a blistering tornado of velocity. The first song served more as a warm up, an intense pastiche of big bang psychedelic rock. Hiroshi’s synthesizer soared and swooped with futuristic time travel. Makato Kawabato played shattering electric guitar – ceaselessly outpouring solos and slashing rhythms like molten lava. Tsuyma Atsushi’s bass rumbled dark like an eclipsing avalanche while his strutting passionate singing full throttled a spectrum from barking growls to whirring soft throat singing.

Nervous, chalky silence pulsed for five seconds after rowdy applause before the second song “Dark Star Blues” ensued sonically danced disorienting propelled with a seasick, seesawing guitar riff. Atsushi vocalized clipped yodeling cum throat singing with Hiroshi and Kawabato doing brief backup. Blues solos seared celestial cosmic portents.

Characteristically, most of the set blurred together – smothering any silence between. Occasionally, strange atonal skronk rock shouldering with free jazz sensibility slithered malefic between lengthy epics. More entangled diversity also shone. The set’s midpoint found Kawabata playing some cylindrical metal rod, making eerie moaning passages out of the drenched reverb guitar while Atsushi belted gritty Japanese. The surprising electric blues then mutated into fragments from their epic La Novia album, reinterpreted. All instruments gradually faded until everyone except the drummer was throat singing. Kawabata found difficulty keeping up with some of the singing as he listened very close to the microphones. No surprise considering his towering large amp cabinet four feet from him.

The epic “Mantra of Love” served as the night’s black diamond. Like a languid spectre, the song sounds like a crystal morning ’til a dark thunderstorm plunders such beauty and all of civilization is threatened to be sucked into outer space. Hiroshi played concise rhythm guitar which counterpoints Kawabata’s fierce rapid fire abstractions.

Kawabata’s guitar playing escapes all easy definition. Each song usually features him doing a beyond-freaking-out guitar solo. Imagine speed metal, classical, psychedelic ala Hawkwind plus numerous Krautrock and Jimi Hendrix aspects tossed inside out then colliding furiously below a black hole’s horizon point. While he is technically proficient, Kawabata’s playing technique also combusts into hallucinatory, conflagrated dissonance. By the night’s last song, Kawabata might as well have shape shifted into a bizarre archangel plundering Earth simultaneously with wraith and beauty. The guitar spookily seemed to control him as he contorted into unimaginable positions, even playing behind his back.

Atsushi still cracks the same joke year after year. With shit eating grin he mutters, “Thank you Georgia on my mind.” The usual encore did not play out as a subtle unexplained weariness shaded their body language. Spying through the Earl’s band room after they suddenly left the stage, the drummer was laying curled on the dirty gray wood floor exhausted – slowly returning to the banal rock club reality.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.