One of the many fine projects Adam Kriney is heavily involved with,
La Otracina with their debut on Holy Mountain show very well that Kriney and his associates know how to make the kind of queasily dramatic psych/drone overload that is manna from heaven to any number of shaggy-haired listeners (and a few clean-cut ones as well). Not far removed from what early Ash Ra Tempel did in terms of overlapping and deep-echoed feedback exploration and noise,
La Otracina add just enough direct anthemic power -- a bit of American classic rock, if one likes -- to compositions like "Yellow Mellow Magic" to make the combination of enveloping sound and hit-the-highway drive work like a charm. "Nine Times the Color Red Explodes Like Heated Blood" deserves mention just for the wonderful and perfectly over the top title alone, but further credit for how a six-minute song -- short for this album -- feels like a full symphony in miniature thanks to any number of different tempo shifts and movements that would do an arena prog band proud, and all while keeping the same feeling of atmospheric drift and propulsion running throughout. Meantime, in more exploratory songs, classic improvisational indulgence of the best kind crops up -- the central guitar melody that steps up in the introduction to "Beyond the Dusty Hills (Cowboy in the Desert, Pt. 2)" perfectly anchors the roiling drum fills. The concluding "Ode to Amalthea," meanwhile, contains the slyest joke of the album -- two minutes into its engaging sprawl, a guitarist picks out the theme used to communicate with the aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Combined with the title, presumably referencing the small moon of Jupiter called by that name, this makes for a knowing tribute to the kind of free-form exploratory space rock of three decades back that happily carries through to a newer time. ~ Ned Raggett