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Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso UFO, "Son of a Bitches Brew"
This is a landmark album in the Acid Mothers Temple oeuvre for a variety of reasons, but not all of them are good.  On the positive side, Cotton Casino has returned to the fold and Kawabata Makoto and company have ambitiously stepped out of their comfort zone to attempt a "true electric jazz album" in homage to Miles Davis' 1970 masterpiece.  Unfortunately, the end result of their bold experiment is a bit of an exhausting, self-indulgent, and muddled mess.
Despite my historic cautiousness and skepticism towards Kawabata Makoto's work, I actually plunged into this album with pretty high expectations.  I love Bitches Brew, so the idea of Davis' vision colliding with AMT's deranged psychedelic chaos seemed like it had a lot of potential.  Also, the cool cover art, the return of Cotton Casino, and the sheer volume of material here (it is a double album) seemed to indicate that this would be major artistic statement of sorts.  And it seemed like it was...initially.
At the very least, Tsuyama Atsushi and Higashi Hiroshi do an impressive job replicating the queasily over-processed sax and distinctive synth sound of the original.  In fact, I found myself kind of loving the opening title track when the rhythm section kicked in with a heavy disco groove.  Unfortunately, my excitement curdled by the song's halfway point and never, ever recovered.  The nadir came when Stoo Odom repeatedly exclaimed "son of a bitches brew!" and cackled maniacally, but that was merely one in a host of many serious shortcomings and bad ideas (a category in which I include the wince-inducing, sophomoric humor of the song titles).
The insurmountable, fundamental flaw that torpedoes the entire album is that Son of a Bitches Brew is essentially 75-minutes of everybody in the band wildly soloing and making weird burbling noises at once.  There is none of the space, structure, and sensuousness of the original, just unending cacophonous squall.  The rhythm section intermittently elevates the disjointed noodling into something much better by sometimes locking into a barreling groove, but the album's unusual mixing significantly weakens the drums' impact.  That is a serious problem, as some raw, visceral power could made these songs a lot more enjoyable.  Finally, and most exasperatingly, this album is not actually much of a diversion from what I expect from Acid Mothers Temple: there is certainly a lot more soloing and freedom, but it is still basically a heavy psych-rock album peppered with more beat-less, structureless freak-outs than usual (and a sax thrown in).
That said, I suspect that this album will be very polarizing and that many, many people will disagree with me.  Acid Mothers Temple's insanity, explosiveness, and excess can be very endearing at times and Son of Bitches Brew might be a high-water mark in all three regards.  To my ears, however, it is mostly a one-dimensional, senseless regurgitation of AMT's usual spew of space-y whooshing and guitar noise that drags on for well over an hour with little perceptible variation (albeit with somewhat higher artistic pretensions than usual).  I honestly do not know how anyone could listen to this album in its entirety.
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