Sometimes it's nice when
Talibam! shut up and play their guitars, so to speak, to borrow a phrase from the late
Frank Zappa, whose goofy Dada obscenity they sometimes inadvertently channel. On a self-titled super-session collaboration with Peeesseye, the two groups head quickly and deeply into cosmic improvisation. Though the first cut, "You Tried (To Eat It)," begins with a mutated keyboard/drum groove accelerating into noise, it is the second one, "New Vitality in the Biomass," that strikes the keynote for the session. With a rich drone running underneath the group, the musicians push and pull against the note at the center, small drum patterns adding up with quiet mathematics as warmly percussive keyboards trace melodic shapes and establish a through-line. The other four tracks, including the 17-minute second side ("Year of the Moral Orgy/Grit of the Ghost"), follow this template, building a central tension around an often gentle drone. In places, the quintet members raise themselves for a bout of chaos ("Grit of the Ghost," the noise-slathered "A Grey Mountain of Human Shit"), but the default setting is toward the noisier end of psychedelic fusion, give or take a few bizarre,
Sun Ra-on-meth chants ("Everything for Everyone"). Besides the free groove of the first track, nearly all the rest sounds like it could be a deleted disc from the ESP catalog: beautiful, free-thinking, and utterly, delightfully impenetrable. ~ Jesse Jarnow