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Seven That Spells - Future Retro Spasm CD (album) cover

FUTURE RETRO SPASM

Seven That Spells

 

Psychedelic/Space Rock

3.84 | 11 ratings

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Eetu Pellonpaa
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
4 stars The album covers of this record give a quite prophetical first impression, and I think it stands as greates achievements from the group's five years span of musical development, excluding the masterpiece "The Men From Dystopia" recorded with Mr. Kawabata Makoto.

In the beginning, monumental "Olympos" is drawn to the horizon via anticipating aural tension creation, building interesting rhythmic hooks and spiraling in jazzy levels. A crash of gong summons a stagnant rhythm to the stage, accompanied with a fine melody from the saxophone. More striking math rock oriented background for lyrical side appears after a short and sudden sonic missile. Drums are given space for an effect treated solo, before the song returns to the starting theme. Song "G" is built from simple repetitive notes interacting and forming layer of rhythms, and t this basis is united sounds delivering feelings of dangerous urban jungle. Minimal and menacing song for solo instruments and hypnotic rhythms is relieved neatly to more free causeways, cruising happily in highway of sounds. Fine decreasing of intensity is achieved in the end, and convincing union of happy and violent elements merges as solemn surreal entity. "Terminus Est" starts with gamelan sounding web of licks, feeling like more powerful and violent version of King Crimson's discipline. The changes in tonal motives create furious sensations of danger and awesomeness, contrasted with "The Abandoned World Of Automata". This long song has laid back calm presence, where a really fine bass melody is conjured upon repeating hypnotic webs. Saxophone creeps in later really euphorically, spacey guitar crowning the tension. The musical freedom increases in the later parts of the tune, which finally returns to the chords were it was borne. Before ending, the main theme smashes in with powered strength, before accepting the jazzy calmness to close the track. This epic is certainly one of my own personal favorites on this record! "Death Star Narcolepsy" returns to more twisting planes, John Zorn reminding chaos noise aggressions appear as fast furious smashes. This terror gets contrast from sudden quietness and sharp rhythm counting for a more exotic klezmer sounding solo. The last twists lead to "Quetzalcoatl", which summarizes to heavy and nasty beatings with quick cross picking euphoria, leading to cool cruising on highway of jazzy saxophone sabotage.

I would warmly recommend this record for fans of heavy avant-gardist jazzy psych rock. I was personally interested to learn to know some fascinating underground music from Zagreb, as I got privilege to visit this beautiful Croatian city in the releasing year of this album. Sadly I missed their gig announced to be there quite close during time of writing, as seeing this group on stage would be very tempting opportunity. By listening the earlier records it has been interesting to witness band evolve from a progressive stoner psych rock as a more sophisticated noise jazz-rock ensemble. I have not heard the most recent records yet though, so I'm unaware the traits their artistic innovation has hurled them to.

Eetu Pellonpaa | 4/5 |

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