ODDBALL IN THE CORNER POCKET

Attention! 'Oddball In the Corner Pocket' picks you up to experience a rollercoaster trip through a very private psychedelic and krautrock realm. Joel Lee from Minnesota/US is the artist behind the project TRIP LAVA. He started to work on this in 2005 and is responsible for handling all the instruments you are able to detect. Besides the drums - which he also played for some other bands before - there are guitar, bass and keyboards respectively diverse electronics too. It took some time and effort until the TRIP LAVA debut finally could be released in 2007.

This album can be considered as one epic if you feel like - the 13 instrumental songs are blending into each other more or less. Just a compilation of improvisations - a collection of diversified impressions, grooving, acid, jazzy, eclectic, spacey. Lee's drum playing often accentuates the toms which gives the songs a tribal groove as for my impression. And this is surely one of the significant album elements - most of the songs have a special drive with repetititve patterns generated by drums and bass. First I would say the album is wrapped into some nice trippy tunes with nu jazz leanings - speaking of the opener Hit single and the last part of Electro Glass Climax PT.2 which are reminding me of the german band 'Beanfield'.

The crimsonesque Hi Hat must be mentioned here of course. This is a dramatic piece, appearing like a tension-filled complex parforce run - lots of overdubbed guitars - droning, riffing, soloing - swirling around in all directions. Impressing - great drum playing implemented too! Probably an interesting find for krautrock fans first of all Flying Tremelo and Gallop Light are striking because of a very experimental attitude - the heavy groove coupled with psychedelic guitars and weird synths. Some songs like Floatingand Sirens are made up more in a common spacey vein with backing synthesizer loops and acid guitar experiments. You will also detect weird speed variations, spooky electronic impressions here and there as well as diverse samples like sneezing babies and crashing porcelain for example.

All these aforementioned elements are put together following a well thought out plan I assume - but also with room enough for improvisation. Now that comes to a conclusion that 'Oddball In the Corner Pocket' is a really convincing song collection - cool stuff! It's worth it to reach for this album - definitely recommended to psych/space and krautrock lovers.