When I was in college I went a couple times to a house where some slightly-older friends lived. Usually everyone in the house was in some sort of drug-induced haze, and, depending on who had ingested which substance, some configuration of residents and guests was almost always installed in the living room picking away at a variety of strange and poorly-tuned instruments. Few of the light bulbs worked so you always got the sense you were in a cabaret scene that got cut from Blade Runner or Eraserhead.
Mystical Weapons’ self-titled record could dubbed directly from the DEA surveillance tapes of that house. Mystical Weapons is deeply bent, a twisted and ambient record that would have given even Hunter S. Thompson the shakes. Equal parts groove, dissonance, surprise and subtlety, each of the 13 songs creates its own sonic world. The duo’s music makes clear nods to the freak-jazz soundscapes of 1970s Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock, the evocative Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross collaborations, the resurgent ambient music of Oneohtrix Point Never and Tim Hecker, and the heavy grooves of Parliament and Hendrix. But although the band is anchored in music history and knowledge, their commitment to improvisation – the record is heavily improvised – keeps the music open and fresh, and the duo format proves surprisingly accomodating. Surprisingly, there are none of the typical jam-band cliches either. (Of course, John and Yoko’s son and the dude from Deerhoof probably have a leg up in the unlikely-to-create-cliched-art competition, but hey.)
In any case. There’s something for everyone on Mystical Weapons. It’s easy to enjoy percussion-and-synthesizer fantasias (“Silk Screen Eyes”, “Distant City”), filthy groove-rock (“Whispers The Blue Tongue”, “Goddess Curlers”), and haunting, reverb-heavy piano interludes (“Dirty”, “Impossible Shapes”) when all of it is just so damn… Interesting. Revealing. Surprising. Pick up this record today and don’t waste any time.
Bars: 4 / 5
Mystical Weapons – Dirty
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Mystical Weapons – Impossible Shapes
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Mystical Weapons – Goddess Curlers
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Mystical Weapons – Colony Collapse Disorder
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