Ghost
Hypnotic Underworld
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Ghost
Hypnotic Underworld
Drag City, 2004
RiYL: old Pink Floyd, Robert Wyatt, Four Tet |
The jamming slowly ascends to a sophisticated interplay of dissonant, underplayed instruments (last but not least, Masaki Batoh's acoustic guitar). Saxophone, keyboards and guitars repeat the trick in "Escaped And Lost Down In Medina," but the music is more lively (with a regular tempo) and driven by melodic motifs. If the first movement was pure disintegration of a message, the second movement is a spiritual gathering of intense feelings. The keyboards still emit sudden spurts of dirty notes, the guitar still drones to the skies, but the saxophone's loud and whirling prayer drives everything into a moving crescendo.
Rock'n'roll finally erupts from "Aramaic Barbarous Dawn," introduced by manic riffs and cosmic keyboards, and then propelled into the infinite by a medieval choir. This is also the first song, with Batoh's vocals penning a surreal scenario, like Salvador Dali meeting King Crimson. The suite ends with an odd finale, "Leave The World," which is simply twenty seconds of very fast drumming.
The 10-minute Gangagmanag is another multi-part suite: a graceful instrumental dance led by jazzy flute and minimalist organ with spectral appearances of the other instruments; a sudden mutation into a bamboo forest; a coda of pounding piano and drums in a psychedelic ambience.
The rest of the album doesn't even come close to the rapture of the monolithic title track, but would still be a significant release by the standards of the average psych-pop band. "Hazy Paradise" is a languid ballad in the style of early Pink Floyd, augmented with harpsichord and King Crimson-ish mellotron. "Feed" is another languid ballad, but this time in the melodramatic tone of David Bowie, while "Poper" begins as a calm, gentle, pastoral medieval-sounding chamber piece for cello, flute and zither that suddenly explodes in a furious hard-rocking boogie a la Jethro Tull.
"Holy High" is a frantic and syncopated number that mixes medieval style and modern neurosis with folk-rock storytelling; "Kiseichukan Nite" is a spoken-word piece with accompaniment of traditional Japanese instruments. The album closes with the mantra of "Dominoes - Celebration For The Gray Days," recited over and over again in a triumphal procession of minimalist repetitions of church organ melodies.
It's the title track, though, that is the crowning formal achievement of a group of visionary jazz-rock musicians. The rest of the album is, in many ways, Ghost's A Saucerful Of Secrets, equally adept at pop songwriting as it is bizarre avant-garde leanings.
PIERO SCARUFFI | Piero Scaruffi runs the exhaustive music database Scaruffi.com. A native of Italy, he has also been praised for his work on the General Theory of Relativity, formal theories of the mind, and artificial intelligence. And no, we aren't making that up.