ACID TAKING AND SWEET LOVE MAKING

This album leaps deeper to the stoned abyss of mathematical rhythms and acid guitar driven power, and also gives strong associations of the Acid Mothers Temple recordings. The graphic and song titles referring to psychedelic, progressive and classic rock songs are treated with very hardcore musical solutions. "Let's Go to San Francisco" announced by Ms. Dokuzović dives directly to formless planes of chaotic fuzzed guitar solos. The monotonic body of this opener is circled by groovy violent themes. The longer tracks open after this warm- up, "Hell from Jazz" builds from radiophonic noises, heavy guitar killing and primitive beating. The epic featureless space of sounds floats in the spheres for abstract seventeen minutes. Next ten minutes lasting "Emmigrant Song" starts with distant chant and call of guitar, and the composition focuses to a guitar riff sounding slightly the associated Zeppelin song's intro theme. The minimalist track has interesting developments in the end, as the pace decreases down really slowly. Math rock oriented runs introduce the first quite clear appearing song on the record, titled "Easy Drugs & Hard Women". Calmer feelings emerge from bass guitar running upon the scenery, guitar calmly counting the notes and cosmic sounds bubbling pleasantly behind. Power grows calmly, guitar solos grows with strength and reaches finally celestial heights, making this my favorite track on this confusing album. The record closes to "Noi Noi", which is a large wave rolling as one repetitive note, and there is nearly no evolvement in this fantastically autistic song. I would consider this album really heavy and intensive in its monotonic qualities, and recommend it to hardcore psychonauts only.

Nice psych!

This is one of the two 2011 studio albums this cool Croatian band released, its name is "Acid Taking and Sweet Love Making which consists of five compositions that make a total time of 51 minutes. It kicks off with "Let's Go to San Francisco", a song which since the first moments the band spread a bombastic psychedelic sound, with great guitar riffs and a fast sound. The curious is that after a minute and a half they put a strange change, the music almost vanishes and a soft passage appears with a female voice; seconds later raw guitars reappear and the jam and psych sound enters once again.

"Hell from Jazz" is the longest track here, a 17-minute song that offers a lot of passages, crazy moments in a rollercoaster of sounds. The spacey and psych sound is here all the time, the not so good issue is that after several minutes of the same it becomes boring, and in moments it even sounds jammed. After some eight minutes it seems to slow down, but it is just a false alarm, what slows down for some seconds is the guitar, but meanwhile the drums keep beating heavy and fast, and after a short break, guitars reappear and play countless notes. In the last minutes we can listen to a calmer track, however the vertigo never disappears, at least not in this song.

"Emmigrant Song" starts soft with a female voice as background, and then guitars, drums and bass appear in order to create a cool rock song with the mandatory psych element. I don't know if this is a kind of tribute to Led Zeppelin (judging by the title) but I feel they do have some influences by that band, in spite they did not create psych music. The music does not change, the structure does not surprise us, so here may happen what I experienced with the previous track: after some minutes, it can be boring. Though I must say I liked this much more than "Hell from Jazz".

"Easy Drugs & Hard Women" is a bit shorter, and it does have some changes (which is healthy to the sound, otherwise it would happen the same thing that happens with the songs above) that puts some dynamism. Though the musical concept does not have exotic combinations of sounds and rhythm changes, we can appreciate here that different synth sounds and other elements are being added while the seconds pass, so it is not that monotone.

The album finishes with "Noi Noi" which is my favorite track of the album. Though the structure here is repetitive, it did not bore me at all, on the other hand, it created that addiction that Seven That Spells are us to create, they know how to persuade the listener and how to make it feel hypnotized and in the end satisfied. What a pity this formula did not work for me in the whole album, but it did in this particular track.

Well, this is not my preferred STS album at all, it has some inconsistencies and it failed to get my true attention in some moments, that is why I will rate it with 3 stars, though I must admit I thought about a lower grade.

Enjoy it!