Mantra of Love marks the second instance that the Acid MothersTemple have drawn their primary inspiration from the traditional folkmusic of the Occitan region of France. The first was 2000's La Novia,a moderately successful attempt at scaling back the band's usualbombast to create a hypnotic side-long group harmonization thatrespectfully paid tribute to their European forbears. However, itcertainly wasn't a very satisfying release for hardcore fans of theAcid Mothers, entirely devoid as it was of the band's trademarkmulti-layered cacophony of reverbed electric guitars and screamingsynthesizers. With Mantra of Love, Makoto Kawabata and companyattempt a marriage of heaven and hell: merging an Occitanian trad-folkpiece to their visceral guitar shredding and hallucinogenic symphoniesof rock n' roll noise. The album consists of two tracks. The first, "LaLe Lo," is a trance-inducing song consisting of no lyrics other thanthe melodic glossolalia of the title, repeatedly sung in the cyclicalstyle that seems de rigeur for Occitanian folk. Cotton Casino takes thelead with her sonorous falsetto, sounding more like Renate Knaup fromAmon Duul II with every successive release. As usual with AMT, reverband delay pedals are turned way past eleven, creating an ocean ofdebris and sonic squall that ripples out from every vocal refrain andstrum of the acoustic guitar. These noisy tendencies seem ever slightlymore sedate than usual on Mantra of Love, a continuation of the trend towards cleanly produced studio efforts begun on 2002's Univers Zen ou de Zero a Zero.The track is gently hypnotic until about the seven-minute mark, atwhich point Makoto Kawabata unleashes a majestic guitar storm ofparticularly defocused fury. Seemingly capable of playing ten wildlydifferent and entirely unrelated guitar parts at once, Makoto's soloingcreates a complex web of cosmic shredding that begs for deconstructionand analysis. The track wanders through several more movements ofrelative quiet juxtaposed with overwhelming thunderousness, finallyfloating up to space on galactic streamers of Hawkwind-esque KORGfuckery. It might be culturally irresponsible, but it's massivelyentertaining. The second track is "L'Ambition dans le Miroir" (for whatit's worth, Babelfish translates this as "The Ambition in the Mirror"),a 15-minute addendum to the first track, beginning in synth-heavy spaceterritory not unlike Atem-era Tangerine Dream, quickly joined byCasino's gleeful chanting before expanding into planet-crushingKrautrock. Although it takes zero risks and does nothing to expand theAMT sound repertoire, Mantra of Love does the trick for now. Read More
