Search - Acid Mothers Temple & the Cosmic Inferno :: Just Another Band From the Cosmic Inferno

Happy music by happy people, if a bit more heavy

John L Murphy | Los Angeles | 03/30/2006

(4 out of 5 stars)

"This album is displayed as having a circular motif on one cover, and on another with the band members under a statue of the Buddha; I don't think there's any change in the content: two long songs. The eloquent liner notes by the famed co-leader of AMT explain this shift of sound and its transmitters to a heavier, denser delivery. AMT as the Heavenly Paraiso UFO finding itself after nearly a decade tired and fearing their musical decline, the co-leader's revelation inspired the new incarnation as, fittingly by contrast, Cosmic Inferno: a darker sound, so he says, but it's really not that dismal or diabolical here. That miasmatic assault from the nether regions can be better heard on the appropriately titled albums Electric Heavyland or Starless & Bible Black Sabbath, for instance.



On Just Another Band, its endless riffing did not weary me, but I found it rather light and carefree. AMT at its heart, whoever the personnel are, manage to convey happiness in playing what they want, an emotion surprisingly less common than you'd assume from most albums by most groups. Their lack of careerism or posing may enable their liberation from conventional musical and record-label doldrums. Caught in a L.A. traffic jam, I debuted this disc and it cheered me up despite my surroundings. It's almost as good for driving as the AMT's IAO Chant album. While I prefer the more Krautrock-ish propulsion of the Chant one-song album, this variation with more of a guitar-driven shamble works well on its own considerable merits. Lots of terrain, as with AMT's best efforts, is covered eagerly. How? Both long tracks, nearly an hour total, are content to keep spinning out the same chords around keyboard squeals, a steady bass and drum support, a few vocals here and there, and a sense of both professional craft and shambling experimentation. The second song, which does not differ much from the first, even ends with a coda, a soft post-coital rendition by one "Tiffany" credited with "erotic whispers."



This is what 1969 might have sounded like at the Fillmore one long concert night if bands had not appropriated the sounds of the Chicago bars and Delta shacks into, say, the San Francisco sound as the psych era bagan to spawn the acid rock and boogie jam early 70s. AMT avoids getting bogged down by any mimicry of the blues; this is comparatively rare among those who are from or who are inspired by late 60s psychedelic sounds, I estimate. Therefore, AMT can twirl about the surface and dance on it rather than being sucked down into the gritty dirt or gunked by the ooze from the swamp. While I give this four compared with five stars for Chant, this is only because the production on Just Another Band I found a bit too muddled. This music is more concentrated than other AMT releases as Paraiso, but it shares this collective's wish to make music to express not agony but enthusiasm--literally, having god working through you, as happens for AMT here once again."