UFO

If listening to bands jamming makes you break out in small, red, itchy bumps you're going to want to look toward some later mid 70s work for satisfaction, say the jazzy psych rock of Dance In Flames or full on Fusion oriented Guru Guru of the late 70s on Globetrotter. This is not that however. This, Guru Guru's 1970 debut album Ufo, is a wonderful and heavily acidic mess.

On the first side we get three songs, all teetering on the edge of the unstructured abyss; flirting with uncontrolled free fall into an ocean of acid so thick and fuzzy there is no swimming out of. Stone In and Girl Call both start out a little sleepy. Some tremendously fuzzed out guitar moaning and groaning here, and some freely wandering drums and bass there (and some AUAUghghauauGhhhHh 'vocals' dribbled out on Stone In! Always love to hear). Both songs start to coagulate into the nearly gone, hectic and frenzied, point of no return, freak outs discussed earlier, but ending just before free fall, or at least Stone In fades out and Girl Call is rather abruptly, but kinda, effectively cut off. Also have to stop and mention how much I love the guitar distortion on Girl Call, some truly deranged, heavy, and fuzzed out wah wahs. Next Time See You At The Dalai Lama starts off sounding a bit more structured than anything else on the album, and seemingly more deliberately paced. The structure and pace does start to falter and waver, Ax, Mani, and Uli all rambling and coasting off into the cosmic brain, then coalescing for a slight time, before succumbing to the drift again.

Now, to flip this fucker over, and here we find that the inevitable has happened. You dance and prance for so long on the edge of psychedelic insanity, that falling into the vastness of kosmische sea will occur. The first of the two songs, sharing the album name, Ufo; sees our intrepid oceanic trawlers completely immersed into nebulous and hypnotic soundscapes. Guitars, electronics, percussion, and effects all dither and scratch around and about, occasionally swarming together into a truly wild proto industrial/noise piece here. A musical rendition of a grimy, old piece of space junk limping through the cosmos. While plenty of classical composeurs ;) were fiddling around with long and exploratory pieces of music, I find they never seem to actually be all that enjoyable, or reach the depths that more amateur works do. When you fiddle with the unknown the known ain't going to cut it. The final track Der LSD/Marsch is more grounded, but no less prescient. The first half, Der LSD I guess, sees some strung out guitar calling out over foggy, sunken graveyard, while some plodding bass and wispy and haunting, electronically treated flute(?) (Kraftwerk!?) slowly flow around. This all mends together into possibly the most cohesive our intrepid group have sounded, or it just seems so after the past 12 minutes. Marsch is appropriately titled, because after making it out of vast cosmic, oceanic, expanse it's a long walk back. Guitar, bass, and drums all have moments of cohesive, buoyant, forward drive, but fall into a tired and languid sounding plod on occasion.

Proclaims the group on return "Soon the ufos will land and mankind will meet much stronger brains and habits, lets get ready for that."