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Dhidalah's "Threshold"

In making my music purchases for June I faced something of a classic explore-exploit dillema. My favourite discovery of May was, far and away, Sungod, and that discovery got me very excited about Krautrock, spacerock, and other music of that broad ilk. "Should I just buy a lot more of that", I wondered, "or also keep trying new stuff to push the boundaries?". In the end I adopted a mixed strategy. This album purchase was very squarely on the "exploit" end of the scale: Dhidalah are a Japanese space rock band, formed in Tokyo in 2013, and last year's "Threshold" is their latest ablum.

Not only is Threshold unquestionably space rock, it's very heavy on the "rock" part of the equation. One review on Bandcamp describes the album as having a "great blend of spacey moments and rocking out". I'm not sure I agree: the balance has to be 80:20 in favour of rocking out. This is as loud and hard as I've heard something that I would still definitely call space rock go, and I'm not sure I'd enjoy anything which pushed much further in this direction. To some extent this was a deliberately extreme sample, to try to get a feeling for exactly where the boundaries of my tastes lie (which perhaps undermines its value as an "exploit" purchase). I enjoyed this album, but I think I prefer music closer to the work of Sungod than this. But, when the mood is right, I can definitely appreciate this.

There are only four tracks on Threshold, but three of them are 10 minutes long (plus or minus 30 seconds), so it's not really fair to call it a small album. I do, however, think it's fair to call it a fairly homogeneous album. There is a pretty consistent sound carried throughout the whole thing, which is not necessarily a problem. It's hard for me to really characterise the sound, but there are two things I'll comment on: every now and then I pick up on a particular vibe in Threshold which, for some reason, makes me think of surf rock (most prominent on the opening track, "Neuer Typ"). This is strange, because I know almost nothing about surf rock, but, well, there it is. The other common factor is a certain sound that I guess is made on a modular synth or something like it, a kind of smoothed-out and sustained noise with slowly shifting pitch which sounds like an old fashioned movie or TV sound effect for a jet engine, or rocket engine. That possibly makes it sound cheap and nasty, but it's not, I quite like it, at least in this context. The final track, "A.U.M", is the longest and probably also the most unlike the others. It's slower and generally less spacey, and at times feels like it has crossed over into some kind of metal subgenre - doom, or stoner, or sludge, or somesuch (although that surf thing creeps in to some of the second half of it, too). I think it's my least favourite track for this reason, although that's not the same thing as it being a bad track. Without it the album would just be too much of the same sound.

I'll probably give Threshold a listen from time to time when I'm in the mood for something heavier, but I do think I prefer my space rock more mellow than this, and a little more variable and wandering.