Monday, August 10, 2009

MAHER SHALAL HASH BAZ-RETURN VISIT TO ROCK MASS, 3xLP BOXSET, 1996, JAPAN










The extraordinary second release by this semi-legendary Japanese underground troupe was this sprawling (and I do mean sprawling...there's well over 2 1/2 hours of music here) 3 LP boxset concurrently issued as a 3xCD set as well and it's without a doubt one of the cornerstone documents of Japanese outsider musical thought of the last 15 years. Spearheaded by longtime Japanese underground mover Tori Kudo, who emerged from the same Minor club environs as did Keiji Haino, Kousokuya and a good bit of the PSF-endorsed noise psych crowd, MHSB have latterly gained a goodly bit of exposure via releases on Pastels member Stephen McRobbie's Geographic label, collaborations with Bill Wells and a handful of well received international festival appearances. The approach of most western reviewers has been almost uniformly to celebrate MSHB as a wholly unprecedented phenomenon, something that those of you who've scoped out the work I've previously posted from both Pungo and Katra Turana will know just ain't so, both having set the stage for this sort of whimsical and wheezily askew theatrical rock fragmentation. Kudo's masterstroke was in mating this modality to a poignant and (for all their calculated "offness") flawless command of the syntax of garage-y West Coast psych, with a superficially naif Cornell box-like fragility morphing in a few wobbly bars into uncannily accurate approximations of the sorta fuzz psych bombers that could have been pulled straight from the grooves of a Nuggets comp. It's an aesthetic that sees no problem with integrating everything from delicately shaded Pascal Comelade-like miniatures to surf guitar and the limply pastel and winsome with sojourns into the sort of detuned circus-y quease that Tom Waits started getting at circa Frank's Wild Years, with off key tubas and euphoniums affably wheezing and parping away with all the earnest effort of a first year school orchestra.


Get LP 1 via Rapidshare here

Get LP 2 via Rapidshare here

Get LP 3 via Rapidshare here

14 comments:

s. said...

Oh wow... YUM!

dreams-dxt said...

thnx!

Anonymous said...

Thanks so much! I have been wanting to hear this for ages now.

Anonymous said...

thanks Boss!

Anonymous said...

i got this quite a while ago from a blog and listened to it some at the time, but have been addicted to it of late, an absolutely amazing piece of work, so much great stuff in those 3 hours, and the absolute best of Maher I believe as well

gojira said...

This sounds fantastic, Thank you

Anonymous said...

oh, how amazing music, wow !

Anonymous said...

love love! great!

Joshua Dunn said...

Really, really amazing. Thank you, thank you. "My Table" "Last Day" Thanks.

Cameron said...

Great release, i really love this record. Kazumi-san from PSF records sticks rock mass on the good side of Maher, but anything after their fourth release is supposedly 'bad pop music'.

Likedeeler said...

I loaded this from you months ago. Today, finally, I come around to listening and find myself oscillating between full fathom five and heavy clouds somewhere up there. Wow.

Anonymous said...

megaupload....

Tagore said...

could u repost the links?

Bobcat said...

Greetings, I know this blog is currently inactive but could anyone repost the links or something? This release is insanely hard to get!