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Bondage Fruit - Bondage Fruit IV CD (album) cover

BONDAGE FRUIT IV

Bondage Fruit

 

Zeuhl

3.47 | 53 ratings

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Sinusoid
Prog Reviewer
2 stars IV-gettable

I hold Bondage Fruit's fourth album (with a Chicago-esque naming scheme) in the same regard as Ahvak's lone album; avant-garde, musically sound, does everything correctly in the ''Wow, I'm very impressed'' department, yet it is lacking in warmth and devoid of anything memorable. Everything the band does in the overall musicality is wondrous, but you run across albums at times where the parts don't really add up to anything.

Actually, there is one hitch that BONDAGE FRUIT IV offers that gives it uniqueness; it's an RIO/Zeuhl album that got stuck in Louisiana for a couple of songs. I can point out the beginning of ''Screen Game'' have a unique slide guitar sound but veers off into psych rock afterwards and the raga-country of ''Old Blind Cat''. My big problem is that the themes all around are nice, but are just meh after a few minutes because the development isn't engaging. Bondage Fruit are missing some intangibles of long form jamming on this record, specifically in the longer tracks.

A quick few words about the longer numbers: ''Storm Bird, Storm Dreamer'' sounds like the guitarist and drummer laid down a basic track and the other members of the band overdubbed noodling over the top; noodling that sometimes comes up with a theme, but a lot of times sounds like bad, unplanned improvising. ''Sono Bank'' has a nice start, but it sounds like no one seems to know what to do in terms of developing the jam leaving it rather unfocused and hard to sit through (especially at nineteen minutes).

Yes, I understand that BONDAGE FRUIT IV is wacky, experimental and ''out there'', but those qualities alone a good album do not make. I would reward the album more if I thought that the experimentalism was anywhere enjoyable. There are better Zeuhl, experimental and psych-jamming releases out there, and I would only recommend this album to anyone that wants to hear bluegrass pop up in a Zeuhl album.

Sinusoid | 2/5 |

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