Mainliner - Psychedelic Polyhedron,LP,1997,Japan/France

This was their storming sophmore release and featured the legendary heavy psychedelic trio : Asahito Nanjo (bass, vocal), Makoto Kawabata (guitar), Tatsuya Yoshida (drums). Warning: this is true revolutionary reverberating rock music for the adventurous traveller.Comparisons between Makoto Kawabata and Frank Zappa have been flying around ever since the Japanese guru has caught the ear of the international underground, but rarely has he been coming this close to the American guitar hero than on the opening minutes of "Show the Cloven Hoof" His electric wah-wah playing is extremely reminiscent of Zappa's work circa "Chunga's Revenge", minus the extra reverb and distortion. And the rhythm section isn't bad either! Actually, as far as Japanese supergroups go, Mainliner was one of the most powerful, drawing equally from the heaviness of High Rise's Asahito Nanjo's bass, Acid Mothers Temple's Kawabata's freak-out guitar playing, and Ruins's Tatsuya Yoshida's impossibly complex drumming. "Show the Cloven Hoof" is a side-long psychedelic rock suite, with solid segments that could have been written down and noisier jams. "Cardinal Virtues" also a side-long number, delves further into experimentation, with Kawabata exploring noisy textures and Yoshida often playing offbeat.

Opprobrium - n°4 - December 1997 (New-Zealand)
Hajime Koizumi out, Tatsuya Yoshida in, making the line up that of Musica Transonic but the sound nothing like Musica Transonic. And not much like Mainliner either - both of the two side-long tracks and the album as a whole are so non-fast and take such a long time to approximate a Mainliner-esque speed of intensity that some listeners may even find this "disappointing" in some pathetically microscopic way. But fuck them - this is deliriously indulgent wah-reverb-soaked six-string psychedelic excess, and anyone who cannot understand that its less frenetically breakneck speed offers another way to love an outrageously great band can either purchase Mainliner Sonic or direct their custom towards the psych-collector dealer dolt market, where lots and lots of records costing ten times as much (as even a French import LP) but possessing one-tenth of the worth are readily available. No one ever said life would be easy for band who with one 30-minute album have coined a sound so remarkable that it immediately becomes theirs’ for the rest of known time. Nick Cain

MINDBLOWING!

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