TANTRIC OBSTACLES

Rating Ozric Tentacles albums is extremely difficult. The band have pursued a consistent sound over the course of their career, varying it organically and slowly rather than taking great departures, and sometimes it's hard to distinguish them.

However, the jump from Erpsongs, their debut cassette release, to Tantric Obstacles, their second release, is perhaps the biggest musical leap they have made between one release and the next; the only real competitor is between The Bits Between the Bits (their final cassette album) and Pungent Effulgent (their first LP), and even then that's less to do with musical style and more to do with the production values. On Tantric Obstacles, the Tentacles offer a much more coherent and cohesive blueprint for their future space rock sound than the more diverse and unfocused Eprsongs was able to muster.

Past releases of this have had shaky sound - given that the original is a taped home demo, no wonder - but the most recent round of remasters has done a great job of teasing out the finer features of this early Ozrics landmark.