BEYOND SPACE EDGES

The only album cover to so far be released in color, BEYOND SPACE EDGES was the third release by UNIT WAIL and came out in 2015 two years after the previous "Retort." The album features 11 tracks at around 46 minutes playing time and features all the same members as the first two releases only this time UNIT WAIL offers some new sounds to the mix with guest musicians. Ana Carla Maza delivers some cello performances and although the band is an instrumental one, Sam Benzo guests on voice.

Not deviating significantly from the previous releases, BEYOND SPACE EDGES offers some new synthesizer tricks that sound inspired by Ozric Tentacles and bassist Adrian Luna offers a return to some of the Jannick Top inspired zeuhl bass grooves more prevalent on the the debut than the sophomore release. Once again this is dark sinister sounding noisy affair with Franck Fromy offering his best Frippian guitar antics in conjunct with the sporadic drumming frenzies, dueling synthesizer motifs of atmospheric construct and strange keyboard dominated extravaganzas.

As unpredictable as ever UNIT WAIL delivers a never-ending series of musical variations and not necessarily on a theme. This band seems to have mastered the art of random steering through the chaosphere of sound and simply tames it as it haphazardly navigates through it. Somehow these five members always find the exact proper way to simply dive into a groove or a riff or a sustained atmospheric presence and then just decorate around the edges until a bonafide avant-garde composition is born. "Polymorphous The Wise" offers something completely new for the band however with the addition of vocal contributions albeit completely nonsensical and in the context of a knotty avant-prog darkness that represses the gloomiest and darkest chapters of Fromy's Shub-Niggurath days.

While any UNIT WAIL album is a veritable smorgasbord of strange crazy complexities that deliver nightmarish atmospheres, time signature crazy complexities with guitar riffs and fireless bass grooves whizzing any which way along with the percussive paradigms of post-apocalypse pandemonium, BEYOND SPACE EDGES seems just a tad more in the arena of psychedelia as evidenced by the trippy album cover and wailing synthesizer tones and oscillations that seem to lurk around every corner but once let into the forefront offer a freaky cosmic venture into the early world of Krautrock. However like other UNIT WAIL albums, BEYOND SPACE EDGES also engages in the skronky guitar, bass and drum interplay that continues the frenetic display of organized chaos.

With another round of ingenuity wrapped into a ceaseless fire of chaotic bombast, psychedelic escapism and the pulsating pummeling of the senses, UNIT WAIL delivers yet one more installment into its ceaseless explorative nature where seemingly no time signature is left untapped and no contrapuntal weirdness has been not considered. The band's explorative nature is taken even further with the closing "I See Earth" which offers guest cellist Ana Carla Maza to delivers some of the most riveting and nerve-wracking sounds ever crafted on an instrument that is more often known for its stabilizing effect on a song structure. Once again UNIT WAIT delivers a successful batch of bantering little scalawag deviant mutants of sonic creation that will surely please the most adventurous music listeners out there. Demanding as hell and as cuddly as a porcupine, UNIT WAIT dishes it out with gusto!