It's been a little while since my last album review, but I'm okay with that. Now that my dedicated "Three Albums per Month" gemlog has been discontinued and merged into my (mostly) unified gemlog/phlog, I don't feel quite such a pressure to stick to a rigid schedule of, well, three albums per month. I think this is a much healthier attitude. I shouldn't be creating obligations for myself with arbitrary deadlines when it comes to things I do for fun. I will also dispense with the "this month's purchases" teaser posts. I'll buy stuff when I buy it, and review it when I review. Anyway, without further ado, today's review is of:
Kikagaku Moyo's "House in the Tall Grass"
Kikagaku Moyo ("geometric patterns") are a Japanese psych rock band who also happen to own the "Guruguru brain" record label to which the previously reviewed bands Scattered Purgatory and Dhidalah are signed. "House in the Tall Grass" is their first album from 2016. They've had four since, but I figured I may as well start at the start.
Previous review: Dhidalah's "Threshold"
Previous review: Scattered Purgatory's "Lost Ethnography of the Miscanthus Ocean"
For whatever reason, after discovering and falling in love with the spacerock/krautrock sound of Sungod early on in this project, rather than just seeking out much more of the same I have been spending time instead exploring the boundaries of adjacent genres to try to get a better feel for exactly where my tastes are going. Buying "House in the Tall Grass" was another experiment in that exploratory spirit. More recently I've actually switched modes from "explore" to "exploit" and have found and bought quite a few albums which are much closer in sound to Sungod, and am a lot happier for it. The exploratory phase has been worth while, but I really think I'm onto a good thing with the spacerock direction and I'm just going to stick with it for a while. I am looking forward to reviewing these more recent albums once I work through the backlog, so hardcore spacerock fans stay tuned!
Kikagaku Moyo are what I think of (with only the vaguest understanding of the history and range of variation of the genre) as a straight-up, old school psychedelic rock band. As expected, there's lots of heavy fuzz and echo effects on the guitars, but aside from that this is purely acoustic affair. Unsurprisingly there's none of the heavy sequencer use of Sungod which I love so much, but there's also none of the the spaced-out keyboard use I associate with more electronics-laden psych acts like Pink Floyd. Not only is there a lot of acoustic guitar in here, giving a bit of a folk vibe to the album, there's also some sitar as well as some tabla or similar drumming, lending a fairly heavy hippy vibe to the whole thing. On the whole it very much sounds like something from the 60s, or at least the second-hand image of the 60s I have received through mainstream popular culture. It's not really my jam for the most part, but I can quite enjoy it when I'm in the mood.
There's a good amount of variety to the content on this album. Some tracks are just short little ditties, one or two minutes long, while the longest one just cracks ten minutes. Some tracks are instrumental, but others have (very low-key) Japanese vocals. The longer running tracks are internally fairly diverse, and while they are my favourites, somehow I find them a bit dissatisfying. I know I have written previously about my appreciation for long, meandering tracks, which wax and wane between "spacing out" and "rocking out", so this might be surprising. I don't feel like I can honestly say the long tracks on this album *don't* do this, because in fact they do, but somehow the balance is off, at least to my tastes. Some of the longer tracks don't really "kick off" until the very end when they only have a minute or two left. I wish they'd do it for longer, or do it more often. It's especially frustrating that some of these tracks end by simply fading out while the band is still belting out what is the most engaging part of the song for me. The opening track, "Green Sugar", does this, for example. I am left wondering how much longer they actually played for in the studio, and why the track wasn't made three minutes longer? Ultimately, across the entire album there is maybe five to ten minutes of good music that I quite like, it is just spread too thin with what amounts, for me, to fairly uninteresting filler in between.
If I had to pick a favourite track, I suppose it would be "Trad": the penultimate and second-longest track on the album. I like it especially for the second half. It really picks up after about the 4:30 mark and, unusually for this album, once it gets going it just doesn't stop until, well, it stops. "Silver Owl" (the longest track) has a similar structure - a long, slow, mellow build up with a second half that's heavier throughout - but it just doesn't get quite as energetic.
This probably isn't an album I'll listen to very frequently, but it was worth the experiment. Listening to some of the tracks before buying it I definitely thought "hey, this isn't bad at all", and often time music that starts out that way can become a hard favourite if you give it a chance and listen to it enough. That didn't happen this time, but at least now I know with confidence that I really do prefer my psychedelia heavier and more electronic.