ICOMOS

The World Heritage is an improvisational rock group formed by Yoshida Tatsuya, with one of his most often collaborating bassists (Nasuno Mitsuri), Kido Natsuki and/or Yamamoto Seiichi on guitar, and Katsui Yuji on violin. The music present on this album is almost always high octane, powerful material with little down time...what there is of down time is often a nice short break from the crazy power of the rest of the album.

The best way I can think of to describe this band's music is Korekyojinn with one to two extra instruments and a lot more improvisational. As the lineup info shows above, some tracks are simply Korekyojinn+Katsui on violin, while others have all of Korekyojinn plus Katsui and Yamamoto both joining in, and some don't include Kido. Really, we get to hear three different lineups of the group on the album. As far as their ability goes, everyone here is a more than competent improviser. Occasionally some of the pieces drag in places, but never long enough that I want to skip the track. Usually right after a dragging bit they come back with something extra fun, so it all evens out in the end. A lot of the music displayed here is noisy and chaotic, but that's something I've come to expect from improvisational bits from Yoshida and crew, and something I really enjoy, since it never crosses over to the realm of "mostly noise".

Overall, this isn't one of my absolute favorite Yoshida groups - I prefer the more composed sound of Korekyojinn more when I want that, and the chaos of Ruins more when I want chaos. Still, this album is quite a lot of fun, and I would recommend it to any fan of the instrumental side of Yoshida's work with full groups (as opposed to the drums and bass only approach of Ruins). Really 3.75 stars, rounded to 4.