Available at PSF Online
| White Heaven - Out |
| Every
great album has at least one. A moment that makes you pause/blink/drop
your jaw/shoot beer out your nose in amazement. In "Blind Promise," the
first track on White Heaven's spectacular album "Out," one such moment
comes in at 2:46. The maelstrom of crashing, driving psych stops
cold as Michio Kurihara's adrenaline fueled guitar rears up like a
furious, starving cobra, lunging at you through the speakers in a way
that may well cause you to back up several feet, just to give the
damned thing room. "Out" is one of those albums that knowledgeable rock geeks evangelize from time to time, passing umpteenth generation cassettes and CDRs amongst themselves with the standard "you HAVE to hear this" speeches and hyperbolic enthusiasms. The relative scarcity of "real" copies have only fueled this, not to mention the later high profile careers of You Ishihara (Stars, Ai Aso, mixing on the Japanese version of Boris' "Smile") and Michio Kurihara (Ghost, Stars, Boris, etc.) Hyperbole can kill an album if the listener's not ready, but as a writer, it's difficult to talk about "Out" without walking that dangerous line between honest assessment and setting up unreasonable expectations. It really is that good, and it's difficult to imagine any serious connoisseur of heavy psych not losing themselves in the album's near flawless mix of acid drenched paranoia, Velvets melancholy, and Nuggets style songwriting. Even the sound of the record...often a sticking point with lower budget, lower fidelity albums...is dirty gorgeous, simultaneously sprawling and uncluttered, allowing for both mood and function to hit with equal measure. The album has two gears: in your face power, and gentle longing, not unlike the 13th Floor Elevators covering the third Velvet Underground album. "Mandrax Town" does both, starting off soft and building to a cathartic mid tempo that crescendos only to take a quick breath and come at you again, Ishihara and Kurihara's twin attack coming at you from both sides. After a slightly longer break, that gentle longing sounds more sinister than mournful as Ishihara's ghostly moaning wails from a deep pit of despair. It's Love's "Signed D.C," The Velvet's "Heroin," and Bauhaus' "Nerves" wrapped up in a big twelve minute package. There's only six tracks, but there's not a wasted moment: "My Cold Dimension" is a tight rocker so complete in its conception and execution that I thought it was a cover first time I heard it. The title track could be classified as proto-shoegazer if there was any chance the shoegazers had actually heard it, building to yet another helping of Kurihara's twitching fuzz in the midst of a weary crawl that could have served the expansiveness of Ride's second album quite well. It's an exhausting journey in a bit over 41 minutes, and one of the elite few Japanese rock albums that must be owned by anyone serious about the genre. Seminal and essential. |