Japanese rock band transcends boundaries

When broaching the subject of psychedelic rock, recurring themes tend to manifest themselves: lava lamps, jam bands (e.g. Phish) and marijuana-smoking hippies (e.g. Phish fans).

The genre has its canonical figures (Jimi Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, Steppenwolf) and its current torchbearers (Phish, the String Cheese Incident, Widespread Panic).

Yet, these bands, as popular and well known as they are (especially among collegiate crowds), only represent a particular derivation of psychedelic rock.

For a more adventurous and intriguing take on the genre, one need only to hop, skip and jump the other side of the Pacific to Japan. Yes, Japan.

Much like their American counterparts, Japanese psych bands draw heavily from the aesthetic and style of their idols. The crucial difference is that the Japanese tend to exhibit a flare for the unexpected-culling from other diverse musical influences.

Enter Acid Mothers Temple. The group was formed in 1996 by guitarist-mastermind Makoto Kawabata not as a band, but as a "soul collective," which should provide some indication as to how Kawabata approaches his music.

In a nutshell, Acid Mothers Temple sounds like a cult of Japanese psychedelic rock shamans worshipping at the altar of Black Sabbath while in a drug-induced haze. The impact of heavy metal bands like Black Sabbath and Blue Cheer on the Japanese psychedelic scene cannot be understated.

Acid Mothers Temple, along with contemporaries Boris and Green Milk from the Planet Orange, are part of a larger Japanese psych scene that filters their music through the dark, opaque lens of heavy metal, both of the Western variety and Japanese - High Rise and Fushitsusha being primary influences.

These Japanese bands similarly have an insatiable proclivity for making and producing music.

Over the course of 10 years, Kawabata and his ever-revolving lineup of musicians have released a torrent of music, with twenty official albums being a conservative estimate.

In 2006 they released two albums: Starless and Bible Black Sabbath in early February and then Have You Seen the Other Side of the Sky in mid-June. The latter is the more high profile release. Unfortunately, that album is also the more disappointing of the two. Have You Seen the Other Side of the Sky is at once unmistakably AMT, but also a marked departure from their earlier efforts.

"Attack from Planet Hattifatteners" kicks things off with a short (by AMT standards) six-minute explosion of guitars, flutes, saxophones, synths, chimes and loopy pedal effects. It's classic Acid Mothers Temple, but what's missing is any sort of build-up or anticipation.

The next two tracks eschew aural assault in favor of acoustic ramblings featuring vocalist Nao, who replaced long-time vocalist and co-ringleader Cotton Casino. While not completely unexpected, these tracks feel uninspired and tepid compared to their more recent output.

"I Wanna Be Your Bicycle Saddle" offers a glimpse into the hellish noise that Acid Mothers Temple is able to conjure, but after one minute and 40 seconds, the moment flits away. It is not until the final song, "The Tale of the Solar Sail-Dark Stars in the Dazzling Sky," that the album begins to redeem itself.

Over the first five minutes flutes drone on until they sharpen into a screeching, cutting point that gives way to gentle, but foreboding guitars. Throughout the remaining 25 minutes, the song cycles through phases of music and noise; creation and destruction; psychedelic peaks and plateaus. Taken as a whole, it's less of a song and more of a blissful spaced-out psychedelic overture.

AMT's second release of 2006, Starless and Bible Black Sabbath, embodies this sentiment even more so. The crux of the self-titled song is introduced in the first two minutes, while the remaining 32 minutes are the icing on the cake.

As the title suggests, Starless and Bible Black Sabbath owes a heavy debt to the stylings of Black Sabbath and progressive rock group King Crimson. The song rumbles along for 10 minutes before hitting a groove for six minutes - ample time for Kawabata to showcase an extended guitar solo.

Then, all hell breaks loose. Grooves give way to earth-shattering pounding. Guitar notes transform into sheets of noise cascading over a flurry of electronic chirps and gurgles. A maelstrom of cosmic energy, esoteric passages, and bombastic ambiance envelops the listener for fifteen minutes before subsiding.

Around the halfway mark, the song is right back where it started, slowly building up another aural assault from the same musical motif introduced in the first two minutes. But the song does not reach the inter-planetary heights from earlier on.

Instead, the band settles into the soul-crushing dirge of Sabbath-inspired metal for seventeen minutes. At this point, the song calls to mind the repetitive, trance-like sounds of stoner metal icons Sleep and Om.

As the song closes, down-tuned electric guitars give way to acoustic guitar-plucking and ethereal swirls of indistinguishable vocals, as if to gently bring the listener back to reality from a religious epiphany.

This may not be the music of the gods, but I'm pretty sure it's what they're listening to on the other side of the sky.