Keeenly

Throughout a very productive stretch in the '90s and early 2000s, Japanese psych-rock outfit DMBQ churned out volumes of wild-eyed heavy music adjacent to the overblown tones of their friends in the Psychedelic Speed Freaks camp (High Rise, White Heaven, Fushitsusha), but developed a distinctive voicing of that raw volume and unearthly experimentalism. Though bandmembers stayed busy with other projects, 13th album Keeenly is their first recorded output in over a decade, and takes their sound to places never before explored even with their extensive history with sonic weirdness. New waves of fans cropped up in DMBQ's decade-plus of dormancy, and one such fan was garage rock visionary Ty Segall, who released Keeenly on his Drag City subsidiary label God? Records. Elements of their early influential sound are still intact, with punishing Blue Cheer guitar tones, possessed drumming, and crude, rough-edged riffs exploding through in the first seconds of the album. However, somewhere near the end of nine-minute opening track "Blue Bird," something shifts. As the song enters one of its many breakdowns of lawless soloing and delay-drenched vocal yelps, the band begins to fall out of sync. The song melts first into a formless jam, then into the continuously mixed wall of ambient feedback "Alone in the Milky Way," and then, five minutes later, it segues into even more intense blocks of noise on "Fitzcarraldo!" This uninterrupted suite represents "Side One" of a four-sided double album where, rather than just revisit known modes, DMBQ take new risks with the limits of their sound. The meeting of Sabbath-esque doom riffing like "No Things," spazzy freakouts like "So the Word of Good Spread," and occasional moments of spaciousness or restless noise throughout makes Keeenly a versatile listen that's held together by a sense of searching. The band recorded the album live using only analog gear, and the sound is vibrant, anxious, and often otherworldly. Whether jamming on a grim, angry sludge metal riff or wandering into spectral, twilight-colored psychedelia like album closer "The Cave and the Light," the band sounds enormous, with few tones ever repeating or ideas overstaying their welcome. For a revered group releasing their first new material in years, it would have been far easier for DMBQ to create a serviceable by-the-numbers re-creation of their heyday sounds. Keeenly instead sees DMBQ pushing themselves creatively and landing in some of the more interesting and triumphantly strange territory of their imposing discography.