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Jennifer Gentle's newest release is a live disc documenting a 2002 show in their native Italy during which they were joined on stage by the irrepressible Kawabata Makoto of Acid Mothers Temple. I'm not sure what, if anything, Makoto's monolithic acid-guitar stylings have in common with Jennifer Gentle's eclectic psych-pop. Perhaps nothing, but once the opening drones begin all such questions melt away.
Italian music listeners seem to have an enduring interest in rare psychedelic, progressive and kosmische music from the late 60's and 70's. There is a clutch of Italian labels like Akarma, Comet and Horizon that tirelessly pump out deluxe reissues of obscure chestnuts from America and Europe's recent rock past. Not surprisingly, a number of new groups have come out of Italy in the last few years that owe a tremendous debt to this tradition of psychedelic esoterica.
It used to be that when a band was called shoegazer music it was descriptive enough to illustrate exactly what someone would hear when they put the album on. These days, there are so many bands recording music that passes as shoegazer that it's almost evolved into another genre entirely, and none of it really resembles the original sound. Unfortunately, most of the bands in this genre possess little originality and more than their fair share of mediocrity. Sciflyer, hot off two self-released EPs, prove on their debut that there is still a chance for this kind of music while also displaying everything that's wrong with the psychedelic rock scene.
Brian Foote has been operating the Outward Music Company out of Portland, Oregon for a few years. Their small number of releases have included some singles and full-length releases by Signaldrift, Solenoid, Pulse Programming, and Strategy. Nudge is the result of Foote's collaborations with members of those bands along with people from other Portland-based groups like Fontanelle, Jackie-O Motherfucker, and Nice Nice. While I have to admit that my impression of the outputs by the aforementioned artists and groups have always been rather lukewarm, the combination assembled here far supersedes any expectations.
On their last album, A Silver Mt. Zion grew to the Memorial Orchestra and Tra-la-la Band. This time around the players are the same six stalwarts, and they've added a choir for some extra flavor. As the name and roster grows for Efrim's ever necessary ensemble so also does the music become more and more powerful and damaging. Their songs seem to be getting closer and closer to the gy!be motif, with delicate, fluid, and lovely passages that explode into pounding earthquake-threatening dirges of grandeur. The only main difference is the increasingly awkward Efrim vocals, though it feels like at least he is more comfortable with them on each song, even if they're not any easier to listen to.
Sometimes people just have to be cruel, especially when they're asked to listen to the worst album they've heard in a decade. Anyone who writes reviews will eventually get used to reading all kinds of press releases, from the useful detailed biographic ones to the amusingly erroneous ones to the ones that are quite clearly ridiculous hype for vapid old rope with no substance whatsoever. If The Fly magazine is calling a band genius then any music lover with any aesthetic sense whatsoever will see red hype alarm bells flashing. (The Fly is a faux-fanzine, set up by London based PR wafflers and is given away free at various venues throughout the UK, so that drunk faux-indie kids have something to use when the toilet paper runs out.)
This isn't just a lame Hollywood sequel to a tacky but entertaining guilty pleasure, it's a part three of a series which should have been killed long ago. Uwe Schmidt (Atom‚Ñ¢, Atom Heart) and his gang of Chileans' style worked undeniably well in a humorous way with the Kraftwerk covers on El Baile Alem?. It made sense: Uwe being a German living in Chile and the rest being Chileans, a few who have spent time living in Germany. The vocalist maintained the robotic, inflectionless feeling of the original songs while the group kept to very strict rhythms. The output was something both entertaining and worth numerous listens. To hear it all over again with almost lifeless covers of popular 1970s and 1980s classics is simply laborious. It's a joke that just isn't funny any more.