2018: BEST REISSUES.

Because this year’s word is: ESCAPISM.

1. High Rise - II LP
(Black Editions)

Well, here we are folks – having once held an original pressing of this 1986 LP in my hands in an Osaka record shop before realising that the price tag was roughly equivalent to a salaryman’s monthly pay cheque, I now sit back and laugh in the face of collector elitism, as Black Editions once again do the lord’s work, their marginally cheaper 2018 reissue bringing this eternal, irreducible MONSTER OF ROCK back into circulation, to the sweaty, speechless delight of… well, me, for starters.

The year is important to note here I think. 1986. I mean, it’s a bit before my time, but I nonetheless feel confident in asserting that NOTHING sounded like this in 1986. For aficionados of the Japanese heavy psyche sound pioneered by the PSF label through the ‘90s and ‘00s, High Rise II can be considered Ground Zero, with all the weight of expectation that implies, but I’d also contest that the appeal of this disc extends way wider than that. To put it plainly: if you’ve ever banged your head or shaken your fists to the sound of loud, unapologetic rock music and retain a desire to do so, this’ll floor you.

Bassist/vocalist Nanjo Asahito may have taken his Rallizes-derived, static-gargling / feedback-bleeding recording aesthetic to more challenging extremes in his subsequent Mainliner project with Makoto Kawabata, but here the energy level of the rock n’ roll buzz remains high enough to actually spark flash-forwards to the similarly blown out ‘90s garage-punk excelsis of Teengenerate in places, if you can imagine that.

What I’m trying to say is: High Rise weren’t just pushing a load of formless, bonged out noise blather. High Rise ROCKED. Clearly drawing as much from Motorhead and ‘Raw Power’ as from the weird, intangible engine fumes left behind by Blue Cheer and The Velvets (the stated inspiration for many of their peers in the Tokyo psyche sweepstakes), High Rise did songs, and largely kept ‘em under six minutes too. If you claim to know what Nanjo-san is actually going on about in any of them, you are lying, quite frankly, but, even when they don’t have riffs to die for (ala the inadvertently Mudhoney-birthing epic ‘Pop Sicle’), they still kick out the kind of smoke-belching, punkoid churn that would have seen Lemmy & co happily through to the end of another lager-blackened night.

Few of High Rise’s precursors though dared storm the gates of godly feedback with quite the howling gusto displayed here, and crucially – oh, so crucially – none of them had a guy like Munehiro Narita flipping out over those pulverising blocks of chord either.

Carve that name in stone, brothers and sisters! Munehiro Narita. WHAT a guitarist! I remember reading somewhere that, after High Rise’s glory days, he gave up on music for family reasons, but the Narita family’s gain is music’s considerable loss, and I weep at least weekly for my inability to listen to another couple of decades-worth of his evidently amazing talent. I realise that I will inevitably sound a bit dad-rockish, sitting here praising some lead guitarist’s technical wizardry, but seriously folks, this guy’s particular shred is just exhilarating, shrieking out across these tracks like a mass of sentient, crackling loose wires – he is a precise, jelly-fingered madman, conjuring thrilling, unpredictable shapes from the fuzz-wah trash can fire.

As you will have gathered, I quite like this record. It fairly rules. Certainly, if you’ve spent the early years of the 21st century taking tea with, say, Comets On Fire and their successor bands, Boris or The Heads, there is much to be gained from rolling the clock back to ‘86, courtesy of Black Editions. Sometimes the collector-scum get it right, I suppose.

Visit Black Editions here, listen and buy in U.S. dollars here, or check local dealers for vinyl if other currencies and non-eye-watering postage are preferred.


2. Causa Sui – Free Ride 2xLP
(El Paraiso)

More humungous, capital letters ROCK business here I’m afraid, but you should probably have expected that, in view of my recent tastes.

I am a total newcomer to Denmark’s El Paraiso label and to the members of the band Causa Sui who seem to be chiefly responsible for recording, designing and co-ordinating its prolific output, but I bought this double disc re-do of the band’s 2007 album ‘Free Ride’ largely on a whim, because I thought it looked cool.

I’m very glad I did.. Back at the ranch, first spin of the first side just flattened me with joy.

Though chiefly the vision of guitarist/producer Jonas Munk, at this point at least, Causa Sui seem to have comprised a trad four rock band piece line-up of monstrous potency, and as such they seem to have set out to record something akin to the Ultimate Heavy Rock Album – a task which they proceeded to bring off successfully, with an admirable mixture of stereotypical Scandinavian professionalism and raw, Anglo-Saxon gusto.

Seriously folks – if ever a group of long haired, muscular men are standing on an outdoor festival stage prior to sun-down with a wall of amplifiers behind them, THIS is the sound I want them to make.

The opening title cut throws us a feint, fading up bongos and acoustic strumming for an indelible bit of sun-dazed, Cali desert-psych (“..last night we crossed the border line..”) – it’s lovely, actually, but we know it’s just a tease. As soon as the second number (‘Lotus’) kicks in with a fearsome wash of low-end feedback, a preliminary drum roll and a spirited “yeee-eaaahhh…. ahwohall-ri-i-ight” from vocalist Kasper Markus, we know it’s ON. Even the sound of these guys strolling on for a contrived studio line-check is awesome.

Cue THE RIFF, rolling across the horizon like an MDMA-blasted 21st century ‘Immigrant Song’, crushing all in its path. At which point, I think I quite possibly went “yeee-eaaahhh…. ahwohall-ri-i-ight” myself.

As things progress, Causa Sui spread out, with tracks blithely skipping over the ten minute mark and Munk’s extended wah-wah excursions becoming so remarkable that I think he deserves some kind of award for the most sensitive feet in Northern Europe, yet they remain prostrate before the holy ideal of ‘70s stadium grandeur throughout. Even when echo-laden flute and burbling synths hove into view for the much-needed cool-down mid-way through side # 2, drummer Jakob Skøtt’s extraordinary, Bonham-worthy pummel doesn’t let up for long.

I realise there is no way for me to get through this without sounding like some deathless Classic Rock Magazine bore, so let’s just take a deep breath and get it over with: the production on this album is excellent (the drum sound alone is enough to send most home studio bods off into a fit of silent weeping), and the playing by all members of the band is excellent. The breadth of the compositions is excellent, and the energy of the core performances are excellently captured, even as the mix groans beneath the weight of overdubs.

I realise of course that the world is full to bursting with bands playing workable pastiches of this kind of music, particularly in Scandinavia, but few if any of them can capture the sheer, lightning-in-a-bottle, nostalgia-resistant exhilaration that Causa Sui uncorked for us here.

‘Free Ride’ is not some smug exercise in vintage store aesthetic box-ticking – it’s a record with the power to make grown (wo)men scream and cry and stagger backwards making weird, uncoordinated gestures of excitement, like surly teenagers who just heard ‘Led Zeppelin II’ or ‘Volume 4’ for the first time. Fuck me, is it ever good.

What was I doing back in 2007, anyway? Trying me force myself to like Animal Collective or something probably. God, what a pillock. Growing up is great.

Listen and buy direct from El Paraiso, or check yr usual vendors to avoid international postage (the label has both UK and US distribution).


3. Joe Henderson feat. Alice Coltrane – The Elements LP 
(Fantasy / Jazz Dispensary)

In spite of its misleadingly dull cover design, this unfairly-overlooked-until-recently 1973 LP is some heavy cosmic business, in some ways feeling very much like an unlikely follow-up to Alice C’s all-time classic ‘Journey in Satchidinanda’, even as the very different personnel and varied instrumentation spin it off in some rather more curious directions from that album’s beatific, all-consuming drone.

As the title suggests, the record is framed as a suite around the four elements (hey, why not), and, as the cover’s nomenclature also implies, West Coast tenor sax player and band leader Joe Henderson remains front and centre in the mix, and his strident, rhythmic playing – sometimes bordering on post-Ayler “discombobulated marching band” kind of territory – certainly provides a striking contrast to the lyrical flights of fancy that Pharaoh Sanders made de rigour for cosmic jazz horn-work. Meanwhile, the great Charlie Haden works his usual poised, cerebral magic on bass, pursuing a considerably more exploratory direction than Cecil McBee took with his hypnotic, rock-inspired electric bass lines on ‘..Satchidinanda’, even as he drops just as much of an eternal ear-worm on the opening ‘Fire’.

It is Alice herself however who plays the biggest role in defining this music’s feel and texture, variously playing piano, harp, harmonium and tamboura (often within the same track), and doing so with instinctive brilliance, as was her want. Drummers Kenneth Nash and Baba Duru Oshun further drive home the mystic feel, hitting up a tidal, open-ended storm of tablas, skittering rim shots, bells, shakers, woodblocks and cymbals, lounging behind their expanded kit like a pair of lazy, eight armed vishnus, doing anything in their power to avoid the indignities of a straight snare/kick drum hit. Taken to its furtherest extreme on ‘Air’ and ‘Water’, this lackadaisical approach to time-keeping leaves the music feeling entirely unmoored, lost in space.. which is all to the good, needless to say. (Nash also contributes a memorable spoken word incantation to the closing ‘Earth’, sounding baked out of his brain, if I may be so bold.)

Michael White’s violin remains a silent partner through much of this, but it’s nonetheless great to hear him crashing in for an extended solo on ‘Fire’, and undertaking a soaring duel with Henderson towards the end of ‘Air’, throwing a further spanner into the works of modern jazz’s expected sound palette.

Though ‘The Elements’ is basically an acoustic set, extensive use of overdubs and effects clearly sends us into post-‘Bitch’s Brew’ terrain – indeed, the hard echo applied to Henderson’s screeching, staccato blasts on ‘Fire’ seems to be directly riffing on Miles - whilst the general avoidance of extended solo spots in favour of a democratic, ego-free ocean of rhythmic, pulsing sound puts us firmly within the psychedelic continuum, with the record’s densest moments liable to put modern listeners into an almost Necks/Vibracathedral-esque headspace, even as Joe (like Miles before him) seems to be struggling to overcome his reliance upon boss man / band leader bombast.

Like most of Coltrane’s post-‘..Satchidinanda’ work, ‘The Elements’ pointedly sidesteps the clichés of “spiritual jazz” which she and her collaborators helped to create, instead opening up an endlessly rewarding sonic wormhole into the murky depths of collective mind-meld that the-thing-that-used-to-be-called-jazz was capable of morphing into through the early ‘70s. Doing their damnedest to bypass genre altogether, sessions like this always feel as if they could best be classified as pure psychedelic music, and needless to say, I can’t get enough of it.

The label page for this reissue is here, but check local dealers for copies and Youtube for the sounds and yada yada yada. I mean, you don’t need me to tell you this, do you?


4. Serge Gainsbourg & Jean-Claude Vannier - 
Les Chemins De Katmandou LP 
(Finders Keepers)

I’ll confess, I get totally mixed up about all these iffy-sounding hippie/drug movies that Serge Gainsbourg seemed to spend much of his time participating in through the late ‘60s / early ‘70s – I mean, there are just so many of them. All persistently muttered about and mythologised by Francophile collectors, and all pointedly lacking in any kind of legitimate, English friendly exposure, they represent a cultural honey-trap that I have thus far resisted falling into. But, Finders Keepers assure us that the music for this particular one is THE HOLY GRAIL, so who am I to argue?

Never previously pressed to disc and allegedly sought out, Indiana Jones-style, for decades before the master tapes were finally discovered in a shoebox (or something), the painstakingly remastered results are indeed an extraordinary find, sounding for the most part like an illicit, sun-and-drug blasted celebration of everything that was brilliant about the decadent movie n’ music culture of Europe in the days when everything was pink and orange and fuzzy and scented with exotic spices, just before the cold, hard dawn of the 1970s began to harsh the buzz.

In slightly more practical terms, this means that the best tracks here (‘Pleasure Pit’, ‘Colin-Maillard’) sound as if some members of the same secret order of razor sharp session men who went on to define the sound of Gainsbourg & Vannier’s storied collaborations over the next few years gate-crashed the sessions for a Bruno Nicolai Jess Franco soundtrack.

Which is to say: deeply inappropriate sitars and sundry other ‘ethnic’ droney things roar and jangle in a demented ring-o-roses as flick-knife lead guitar broods and pounces, Vannier’s Clavinet dredges up the faux-archaic riffs from the title city’s crumbling, sandstone finery and the tightest rhythm section in existence cook up a muscle-twitching lysergic groove. Heaven - just pure heaven.

What a time to have been alive, when you could lay back in whatever hip pad you happened to be in at the time and just dig this shit, without having to worry about environmental devastation, cultural misappropriation, global inequality, sexually transmitted diseases and basic human rights.

I mean, so long as we all keep rutting like dogs, there’ll be another generation along in a minute to sort all that out, won’t there? So let’s smoke smack whilst the sun is shining and keep on rocking those sitars….

(…those BASTARDS.)

Anyway. Elsewhere, things go a bit haywire in the way that reconstituted movie soundtrack LPs often tend to, with a brief collection of slightly more traditional Vannier string pieces (not bad actually), a field-recorded acoustic guitar and jew’s harp jam entitled ‘Opium Den’ (nice atmos), and even a brief outburst of some murky Jujouka style flute n’ drum type business (hmm..). Must have been quite a movie.

Oh, and as for Serge meanwhile? Well, his name’s on the front of the record, as you will have noted, but if he’s hiding in here somewhere, I can’t find him. So if the absence of the dirty old bugger muttering anyway in his usual charming fashion constitutes a deal-breaker for you, please bear that in mind before rushing to place an order.

Not ALL of the music rescued from oblivion on this LP is revelatory by any means – if I’m splitting hairs, perhaps FK could have cut some of the extraneous bits and bobs and cut it down to a 10”? - but the highlights are so damned high that a few successive spins will probably leave even the most steadfast of 21st century modernists blubbering away in the corner, chanting “…make it 1969, make it 1969…”. Which I THINK is a recommendation? (It certainly works for me.)

Buy the LP from Finder-Keepers here, but please note that, for some reason (licensing restrictions, perhaps?), they have not made it available to sample, stream or download online in any form. Bummer.


5. Cosmic Invention – Help Your Satori Mind 2xLP 
(Drag City)

As much as I love preposterous Japanese psyche-rock, Masaki Batoh’s band Ghost have always just been a bit *too* preposterous for my liking. This is frustrating, as there were some superb musicians in the group’s classic line-up, most notably singularly inspired guitarist Michio Kurihara (ex-White Heaven), whom you might also know from his early ‘00s collaborations with Boris and Damon & Naomi.

As such, the moments on the one or two Ghost albums I’ve sampled over the years when the band are allowed to get a groove on are pretty spectacular, but…. Batoh’s particular brand of baleful, avant-acid-folk conjuration just really tests my patience, to be honest. I “cannot hang”, I believe is the phrase.

So, when Drag City announced this expanded reissue of a set of mid-‘90s recordings that see the ghost line-up kicking back on some unapologetic classic rock jams under the name Cosmic Invention, after Batoh apparently let them off the leash as means of chilling out after a particularly trying time laying down one of his albums, I had to take a chance and pull the trigger.

Whilst the resulting album is unlikely to flip the switch for anyone not already well disposed to this-sort-of-thing, it’s certainly a sweet retreat for those listeners apt to describe themselves as “heads”, as these hirsute Tokyo retro-warriors gradually loosen up and unravel their collective chops across four lengthy sides of low-key freak-out, digging up the hoariest ol’ free festival era influences they can find.

Much time is naturally spent in pure Quicksilver/SF ballroom territory, vintage organs burbling deliciously as Kurihara’s reverb-drenched picking spins celestial webs of light, but the earlier, more song-based material sees some hulking, Band of Gypsies-style business going down too, with Batoh even deigning to temporarily descend from the astral plain for some straight up rock band front-man duty on side # 1.

Elsewhere, the ghosts of Traffic and (whisper it) Santana are invoked and dismissed, and, quite a lot of the time (this album basically feels as if it lasts forever), things get weird, with long stretches of ominous, burbling analogue electronics, tinkling echoed bells and congas contributing to a sort of sinister, lounge feel, buoyed up by what I think we’re duty-bound to call ‘kosmiche grooves’. I think there's even a saxophone at one point. If these bits had been done by some Germans in the early ‘70s, folks would be murdering each other for copies, but y’know – time and place. What comes around goes around. Or whatever.

the celestial Boz Scaggs cover on side 2 is absolutely sweet, and the final side, aptly named ‘Long Jamming’, is a real monster, with the sainted Kurihara really going to town across twenty whole synapse-sparking minutes. For a guitar-fixated fool like me, it’s pretty unbeatable.

Basically the sound of a bunch of guys just doin’ their thing with no particular goal in mind, Cosmic Invention are unlikely to change lives or minds any time soon, but if you’ve already got the sprawling, psyche-rock pneumonia or the Tokyo Flashback flu, then congratulations – your life-long background accompaniment to creative endeavour and/or filing your tax returns is right here.

Buy or download direct from Drag City here, or listen to some bits here.