ÜDÜ ẀÜDÜ

I hate to say this, but for the first time I have found a Magma studio album that utterly confuses me. Even if ATTAHK has a more mainstreamised sound, UDU WUDU is something I haven't come to realise. The quality of the songs seems to be down compared to earlier, and the direction of the group is no longer clear here.

I prefer to begin with the mammoth epic ''De Futura'', a brutal slab of space synths and manic bass all wrapped around a psychedelic jam. It's well more psychedelic than I've ever heard Magma. Keep in mind that I normally enjoy long psych jams that seem to head nowhere; I tend to phase out too much as ''De Futura'' wears on. It starts off wonderfully, but about ten minutes in, I feel too bored to continue.

Stranger is that I enjoy the shorter tracks more. Of them, ''Weidorje'' is the only one that I would say is a pure Zeuhl experience (to the point where the two composers of the piece broke off from Magma to found their own band under that name). Elsewhere, we get funk (''Soleil d'Ork''), jazz (''Zombies''), classically influenced R&B (''Troller Tanz''; the main melody sounds like ''Figaro'') and the title track that is very indescribable other than disco meets Zeuhl; I kid you not.

UDU WUDU very much sounds like a hodge-podge of different styles instead of one unitary vision, and in short, the inconsistencies keep this album down in rating. The group took the dabblings of funk, R&B and other allsorts, did some Zeuhl processing and put out a better representation of that sound on ATTAHK. In a sense, UDU WUDU sounds like the sample test of ATTAHK; I honestly feel Magma needed to test out how more mainstream sounds worked in their sound before they knew exactly how to channel them.