FARFLUNG

I'm not sure where the blunt numerical title comes from. By my reckoning this is (maybe) the eighth studio album released by the interstellar acid heads from outer-limits Los Angeles (the uncertainty reflects a rather lackadaisical career path since 1995). No matter: the new one is a doozy, however you count it. The better part of a decade has passed since the last recorded Farflung voyage, and it sounds like guitarist Tommy Grenas spent all that time strip-mining asteroids for heavy metals and toxic hormones.

The links to early HAWKWIND are still audible, and strengthened here by a guest appearance from longtime friend and tour mate NIK TURNER. But Farflung always had a more hardcore agenda, taking Hawkwind's time-tested Sonic Attack and injecting it with a shock dose of illegal steroids. These guys aren't just another gang of stoned-to-excess Space Rockers; they play like a renegade gang of delinquent refugees from another dimension, where the building blocks of life are carbon, electricity, and a surplus of testosterone.

The awesome lockstep riffing of "Hive" sets an immediate challenge to unsuspecting listeners: submit, or perish. But don't expect any relief after surviving that initial onslaught; the balance of the album sustains an alien blitzkrieg of churning chords, cosmic feedback, flanger and echo overkill, and all the extroverted authority of a quintet boasting two loud guitarists, two bass players, a solid 4/4 drummer, and lots of oscillating synthesizers.

It's true the music often resembles over-amped straightforward Hard Rock, only slightly warped by an overdose of deadly radiation. But even the more orthodox air-guitar foot stompers ("Preterozoic"; or the oddly- titled "044MZP") drift into some interesting musical black holes, the latter ending in an ominous, atmospheric coda filled with veiled acoustic guitars and more of Nik Turner's Egyptian flute arabesques.

There's even an unexpected but effective update of the song "Being Boiled"...yes, the old Human League chestnut (from back when the League was actually cool). As elsewhere the heavily-treated vocals are presented in a Chrome-plated, adenoidal sneer: a reference of course to Damon Edge and Helios Creed of the Dada-Punk Sci-Fi duo Chrome, another obvious touchstone for Tommy Grenas and company.

It's reassuring to hear an off-radar band like Farflung playing stronger than ever, after twenty-plus years of furious headbanging. Maybe there's a space-time paradox at work, and the band is aging slower as they travel faster into the void. Or maybe it's just a stubborn refusal to grow up. Some kids never learn, even at middle age, when to let go of their adolescence.

The album's whimsical title carries a hint of fatalism, like something Victor Frankenstein might have ruefully muttered after a tough day at the lab. But what exactly is it trying to say? That there aren't enough hours in a day to annihilate our brains with shock doses of guitar reverb and echo effects?

The Space Rockers of Farflung had only been around a few years before releasing their first compilation: a generous collection of unreleased studio tracks and album samples, plus one live performance. Two decades later the band hasn't attained anything near the same galactic fame as their primary role models in HAWKWIND, despite having toured with Nik Turner, and collaborated with kindred spirits like Damo Suzuki, Helios Creed, and Lydia Lunch.

You can add each of those names to an itemized short-list of musical influences: not only Hawkwind, but also the Krautrock legends of CAN, the art-punk anarchists of Chrome, and the noisy No Wave subculture of inner Manhattan (transplanted here to a sunnier solar system called Los Angeles). But Farflung always had its own unique, deep-space aesthetic, rooted in hard rhythms, heavy guitars, and infrared cosmic vibrations, all on ample display throughout the eight selections in this set.

The album opens with their early trademark anthem "Landing On Cydonia": a fourteen-plus minute Floydian space walk with some killer riffing at its climax. Compare that to the later "Icarus/Daedalus", another long, one-chord kosmische jam, eventually falling into a black hole of pure ambiance before its sudden, explosive finish. Like the song's mythological namesake when he flew too close to the sun, prolonged exposure to this sucker at high volume can be fatal.

A surprising but effective cover of the title track from the Can album "Future Days" acknowledges another stylistic link. The choice of song was unexpected from this quartet of SoCal, sci-fi headbangers, revealing levels of nuance and subtlety rarely heard in the Farflung universe. No such refinement was necessary for the live "Mother Orbis", a companion of sorts to the tribal Krautrock stomp of Can's "Mother Sky" (Orbis is Latin for World...Mother Earth, in other words). The song ends the album in quintessential Farflung fashion, with an unstoppable Space Age groove, lifted wholesale from the 1970s but looking forward toward a dystopian future.

My conservative three-star rating is only a reflection of the album's piecemeal structure, where B-sides rub shoulders with alternate mixes, and so forth. But it may in fact be the best introduction yet to the alien charms of this extraterrestrial group.

If Hawkwind was the grandfather of Space Rock, Farflung is his pimply, adolescent stepchild, the kid with a chip on his shoulder and a loaded gun in the closet, hidden beneath his dirty underwear, assorted comic books, and a well-thumbed copy of Anton LaVey's Satanic Bible.

And this is what he does when mom and dad are out for the evening: takes a hit of acid, cranks up the stereo, and flops down on his unmade bed, ready to die in a Wall of Sound.

Throughout their long (and, on this site, largely unsung) history, Farflung has always straddled that razor-blade studded line separating Space Rock from Heavy Metal. The band's suitability to these Archives depends on which way their music is leaning at any given moment: a direction varying from album to album, sometimes from song to song. But on stage you'll hear the heavier, harder-rocking Farflung, playing shorter numbers at a higher volume to a younger crowd eager for total sensory obliteration.

The aggressive headbanger riffing in this set carries it about as far from the lofty ideals of Progressive Rock as you can get without losing your sanity. But there's an awesome energy here that needs to be acknowledged, audible even in a digital facsimile of the '09 event, held in the Dutch city of Tilburg (013 was the name of the venue, where Farflung shared the same stage with Motorpsycho and Amon Düül II). On record the music has serious punch. In person it must have been like receiving an undiluted blast of deadly cosmic radiation.

Farflung was flying closer to Earth at the time, but they hadn't forsaken their Space Rock roots. The longer selections ("Saint Anthony's Fire"; "Landing On Cydonia") often develop into massive interstellar jams, and even the shorter songs typically feature monster grooves. Check out the reverb-and-echo orgy of the concert opener "Breach of Eye", or the headlong thrash of "Endless Drifting Wreck", a title no doubt describing the band's mindset at the time. "Thank you for the acid, Colin..." drawls an obviously wasted Tommy Grenas during the lysergic intro to "Like It Has Never Been", but I like to imagine him winking while saying it, like a method actor in character making an aside to his audience.

At 74-minutes it's an overlong album, except to delinquent metal heads and other masochists. But the full show, from start to finish, is relentless in the best sense of the word. This is music for jubilant ass-kicking, in places making Hawkwind's classic Space Ritual sound like a playschool milk-and-cookie break.

In my limited exposure to the Space Rockers of Farflung this 2002 release stands out as the anomaly in their catalogue. Instead of the guitar-heavy acid rock of other Farflung efforts, the album presents an altogether different, slow-burn brain-fry...crockpot psychedelia for the new millennium.

It was commissioned as a film score, for an obscure Slovenian feature named 'Varuh Meje' ('Guardian of the Frontier'), unseen by this cinephile but resembling in outline an outdoors adventure with mystical/sexual pretensions (imagine an eastern European update of John Boorman's 'Deliverance'). The film was barely released but managed to eke out a few awards on the festival circuit, despite lukewarm reviews on IMDB. The soundtrack might actually have been the best thing in it, although I'm guessing very little of the music survived the final cut. Was it just too far-out for such an earthbound allegorical narrative?

One thing is certain: whatever else it might be, this album ain't Prog. The sound is more a blend of Post Rock minimalism and Krautrock electronica, spiked with echoing guitar shards and ominous synthesizers. Information about the session is hard to find, but it's possible the drummer was on vacation at the time, leaving the various rhythms to be generated by other, non-human means: odd pulsations, and so forth. Note the hypnotic, mechanical groove under 'Something in the Water', recalling an early CLUSTER experiment. Or the sound of creaking oarlocks during the long, hidden epilogue, twisting a similar effect from the first NEU! album into something more anxious and malevolent.

The music was a welcome change of pace for such an otherwise aggressive band. It doesn't grab the listener by the neck and demand his attention, but insinuates itself under the scalp and into your unconscious mind. Here's proof that even the noisiest headbanger can sometimes learn to use his noggin more effectively.

Farflung emissions have been crossing my third eye for years, but only recently have I made an effort to explore their catalogue in depth. So imagine my surprise upon learning that the band, after churning out stellar Space Rock (pun intended) for almost two decades, hasn't received a single review so far in these pages.

Is our progressive net stretched so wide and so thin that it no longer captures those maverick fishes unwilling to swim in crowded, more conspicuous schools? Or does the band hail from an alien galaxy too far beyond our comprehension, in that alternate reality known as Los Angeles, California?

No matter, as Albert Einstein might have said. Allow me to introduce them, briefly and belatedly.

Farflung is a legitimate heir to the throne of early HAWKWIND, taking up that heavy cosmic scepter and carrying it boldly into the 21st century. Their first album, long out-of-print but now resurrected in digital form (with bonus tracks), saw the band escaping the drag of Earth's gravity using hard motorik rhythms beneath a wall of electric guitars, all plugged into what sounds like every flanger, phase shifter and echo box between LA and Alpha Centauri.

The music is very loud and suitably spaced out, but has a certain tongue-in-cheek, retro (rocket) awareness: look at the Buck Rogers cover art, and listen to all the laser beam synthesizers. Or consider the fourteen-plus minute "Landing On Cydonia", an obvious album highlight, the title a reference to that Martian valley where gullible pseudo-scientists once imagined an uncanny human face carved into the extraterrestrial rock. From its atypically melodic, almost Floydian introduction, through the floating Krautrock mid-section to the kick-in-the-scrotum finale, this is quintessential Farflung, and worth the repetition of a bonus demo version, which adds B-movie sci-fi sound samples and a curious band dialogue.

"Farflung never actually sat down and wrote songs", said guitarist Tommy Grenas in a 2003 interview. "We always would get blasted and just jam..." an amusing observation, but not entirely true. There's an energy and focus here not often found in outer space, and the music carries too much residual booster-power for the Stoner Rock image the band likes to cultivate.

That same casual attitude, combined with an equally informal personnel roster, may have denied them the rewards of wider commercial success. But cult groups like Farflung are better suited to a surreptitious, below-the-radar flight plan anyway, and on this initial lift-off their trajectory was sure.