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Nazoranai
After a surprisingly quiet year, Keiji Haino not only reignites the engines that power Fushitsusha but also forms this new trio with Stephen O’Malley and Oren Ambarchi. While I have yet to hear the new Fushitsusha album, Nazoranai hit the same spot as Haino’s most infamous group. Yawning chasms of feedback, pitch black silences and rock distilled down into its most concentrated acts of musical rebellion, this is up there with any of Haino’s best.
Beginning with a tense and sparse arrangement of Ambarchi’s rhythmic percussion, Haino (on guitar and vocals) and O’Malley (on bass) begin casting out a net of gossamer thin notes. The music is oily, pitch-black and slithers out of the speaker like a deep-sea monster. Haino’s voice runs from the urgent to the menacing within a breath as the momentum slowly builds up and up during "Feel the ultimate joy towards the resolve of pillar being shattered within you again and again and again." Pauses eclipse the music as the power grows gradually over the song’s 24-ish minutes (unfortunately split between two sides on the vinyl version). Before I know it, O’Malley and Ambarchi are ploughing through the earth with a solid, powerful rhythm as Haino sets his guitar ablaze with a screaming anti-solo that almost causes the record to give off sparks (it is times like this that I understand Haino’s compulsory sunglasses).
"Not a joy to come closer but so-called a sacred insanity has finally appeared" sees the group entering a loose, Crazy-Horse-on-downers mode; a languid bassline being torn to shreds by Haino’s torrent of serrated steel guitar playing. It honestly would not surprise me if Haino used barbed wire instead of normal guitar strings. While there is little Haino has done that I have not loved, his forays away from his Gibson SG never reach this same sort of magical intensity. It is moments like this where he reminds me that he is an absolute demon on those six strings. He strums a vaguely rhythmic motif, letting the reverberations ever so slightly feedback while O’Malley and Ambarchi circle like sharks around him.
O’Malley and Ambarchi slip free from their respective background roles to take more of the limelight during "Getting a bit blurry brush up your cartel and devote it to something;" Ambarchi pounds the drums like Jon Bonham in slow motion while O’Malley’s snarling bass scratches out a patch of ground, stalking Ambarchi like he was some kind of big game. Haino seems removed from the proceedings, creating a trilling screen of trebly tremolo guitar. The music fits perfectly with the stunning artwork of women bathing by Lars Teichmann that adorns the album’s sleeve: white feminine figures barely there on a black background.
In contrast, the final piece (with the ultra snappy title of "Not to leave everything to the light outside of you but to be aware of the prayer "what do i want to do?" that exists inside of you, and let that go out of you as a light, or things might get worse, no?") is poignant and as close as Haino has ever gotten to a torch song (he even has a hint of Marc Almond about his singing during the song’s middle section). As Haino’s voice slips in behind the music, he unleashes a breath-taking guitar solo that stays strangely close to being melodic for most of its course. It is a glorious finish to such an abrasive and beautiful album, both at odds and in keeping with what the trio have presented earlier in the album.
 
