I have to admit that this band has always been hit or miss for me. More often than not, I have enjoyed their live shows more than their recordings, and this long, single track is unfortunately no exception.

 

Three Lobed

While it starts off intriguingly enough with quiet, ominous drones, every time the band seems to up the ante, nothing much develops. Some snippets of delayed feedback or ringing bells appear every now and then, but they don’t signify any real changes to the music. When other changes do occur, they’re fairly harmless and usually disappear before long, leaving the drone that provides much of the track’s foundation. The song achieves its greatest drama after about 24 minutes, but then spends the rest of the time with a rumbling that fades for so long and gets so quiet that it’s easy to forget that the disc is still playing. Nothing about this recording is bad, per se, but at times it feels like the band’s phoning it in, that this is merely experimentation by the numbers. It’s less structured than their other albums, but not different enough from other experimental work to recommend it. In the end, it’s almost negligible if only because it’s so ordinary.


Read More