KUROFUNE (BLACK SHIP)

The second LP from Japan's Sadistic Mika Band is not only a good entry point for newcomers, but from a Prog Rock perspective is easily their creative zenith. The album succeeded in raising the band's profile outside their own country, in part by trading the perceived (but calculated?) naïveté of their 1973 debut for a more confident Anglo-influenced sound, hardly an unfair exchange given the strength of the material here. A high-profile tour supporting ROXY MUSIC didn't hurt their growing reputation either.

The musicianship throughout is world-class, ranging from pinpoint fusion pyrotechnics to heavy rock power chords to dreamy Oriental psychedelia. The ethereal multi-tracked vocals in the album opener "Sumie No Kuni E" (separated into opposite channels, one voice singing and the other speaking) was a particular stroke of stylistic genius. As was the dramatic segue into the steamroller riffing of "Time Machine", enough to send any closet air-guitarist pounding his fists to the sky.

The band's native Asian culture surfaces at the start of Side Two, but the Far Eastern flavor was undermined in the tongue-in-cheek manner of early FAUST by a defiantly amateur saxophone, and by the ubiquitous funky crunch of a clavinet. Elsewhere, the album's three-part title track (a.k.a. "Black Ship", but the English song names are new to me: all the text on my imported LP is in runic Japanese) really allows the band to show its chops, shifting from manic jamming to a high-caliber Arena Rock anthem with testosterone to spare, all of it captured in the full-blooded production of ace engineer Chris Thomas, one of the premier studio gurus of the 1970s.

It's true that the original ersatz-glam spirit of the band was somewhat compromised by the move to London, where to a certain degree their foreignness was sold as a musical novelty. And the project would soon disintegrate when the husband/wife team of guitarist Kazuhiko and singer Mika Kato sailed into rocky marital waters: see the inaptly-titled "Hot! Menu" album, recorded the following year. But for the time being, as depicted in the fanciful cover photo here, the group was flying high.